Learning from checking in on apps and broadcasting my location on social media

I had something odd happen to me yesterday. Some may consider it scary. I have a feeling that I have put some of the puzzle pieces together.

After work, I went to Starbucks to get a beverage. The baristas there were nice. I ordered my drink through the app like I usually do, went through the drive-thru, got my drink, and drove home.

I normally check in using my Yelp app. Some people are afraid of having their location shown. For me, I used to be in this camp. My thought is that checking and then leaving is okay. I'm gone that any stacker can't catch up to you.

Well, here's the odd part. I must have been twenty minutes away. I got a call from this Starbucks location. It was the cafe's phone number on my phone. It was one call after the other for a total of four calls. No message was left.

It then shifted to a completely different number. When the third call came in, I was waiting at yet another drive-thru. I answered the call and stayed silent.

The guy on the other end knew my first name and my phone number. He was wondering why I wasn't answering. Well, I was at a drive-thru deciding on what I wanted to order. He eventually hung up and called back for a fourth time.

I had placed my order. I picked up and said hi. He proceeded to say that I had checked in on Yelp and asked, "Why the f*ck do you check in so many times?" I decided to hang up on him. I didn't like the swearing and I didn't understand why he was so upset.

I have an app on my phone that not only blocks these calls, but I can report them to a database and add my comments. I did just that.

I see a couple of things that contributed to this incident:

• When I checked in on my Yelp app, it also broadcasts that check-in on Twitter. The guy saw my tweet on Twitter. I looked at the interactions and found one hit in my statistics. Only my friends on Yelp know my check-ins and they are decent people who would not harass me.
• As for getting my phone number, my Starbucks app was compromised a few months back. My phone number was likely obtained from that incident.

Put my tweet and my phone number together, and you have someone out there who doesn't have a life.

I also feel that he has a software application where he can change the phone number that ultimately gets displayed on your phone when you receive a call. It seems rather clean that he used the Starbucks number to call me four times, and then used another one with a different area code exactly four times in the same rapid succession.

When he swore at me, it was quiet in the background. He obviously was not at Starbucks. You cannot be in two different cities in the Greater Toronto Area within seconds.

When I was in Dallas, I disabled my check-ins being broadcast to Twitter. I don't know what possessed me to put it back on, but I have decided to permanently stop it.

It's quite the lesson. The good news is that I have set up these precautions and will see if it makes a difference.