This can and will be used by criminals to target communities that have less tech or tech that is exploitable/circumventable. Yes I am aware that security through obscurity is not the answer.
News stories can and do reveal where rich people live for targeting, reveal security weaknesses at businesses, and encourage copy-cat crimes.
Public security vulnerability releases can and do lead to slow-patchers being targeted by criminals.
Hell, having been involved in physical security leads to me amusing myself while waiting at businesses by analyzing their camera lines of sight and speculating about other measures. (It is usually pretty easy to tell who installed their own systems.)
This makes some assumptions about both how effective any of this is in practice, and how criminals operate, and I’m pretty sure none of those assumptions are true.
It doesn't make assumptions at all. You assume I haven't been around criminals in my lifetime. You also assume criminals aren't intelligent, and that my opinion is an assumption. I'm sorry to burst your bubble but criminals are opportunists and they are intelligent and if they are given an opportunity to assess security they certainly will. My opinion isn't an assumption it's from experience.
Ok, let me step back and add some nuance, because you’re right: some subset of criminals might care. The kind who commit crimes for which the cops bother to use any of this stuff to investigate crimes and catch criminals. At that point the dubious efficacy of most of this comes into play, but sure, certain tech or programs might actually matter.
The other 95+% of criminals needn’t trouble themselves, because the cops won’t investigate their crimes. They’ll only get picked up if they’re caught in the act. It’s not that they don’t care because they’re dumb, but because the cops are lazy as fuck and aren’t investigating most crimes, no matter how many solid leads they’ve got. Unless it’s a murder or (especially) smells like they might be able to confiscate six figures or more of something to sell at auction and/or brag about, they’re not gonna bother. They routinely ignore e.g. extensive video evidence of four and five-figure theft and property crime—not like they’re suddenly gonna get more diligent because the source of their good leads & evidence is slightly different.
But you are correct that there exists a set of criminals to whom this stuff might matter. I was too general in my dismissal.
Your statement presumes that such a list gives new, actionable information of benefit to criminals. This also implies that existence (or lack) of technology is a good proxy for effectiveness of policing in a locale, which in turn implies that the technology was purchased to improve said effectiveness. Neither of those things are obviously true in general, or even on average.
I can see how collating such information might make things easier for some outliers, but it's hard to imagine this making much difference one way or another - the criminals who really care already have much better information sources, and the ones who don't aren't likely to do much research, or act effectively on it, anyway.
