Foursquare and Facebook Places are ubiquitous. Social media butterflies can't seem to resist the urge to broadcast their location online. That's great marketing for a mom-and-pop restaurant, but it could be a big breach of privacy for homeowners and apartment dwellers.
Sharing your address with 10 close friends for an intimate dinner party? No big deal. But when those 10 people each share your address with 500 relative strangers, you might begin to feel concerned about your privacy. Your small dinner party can turn into a 5,000-person broadcast of your private information when you allow friends to "check in" to your home on social media sites.
So how do you prevent your guests from checking in?
Ask Nicely
These are guests in your home, right? While you, as the host, have the responsibility of making sure they're comfortable and well-fed, they also have an obligation to treat you and your home with respect. So it's nothing for you to ask your guests politely, "Darlings, I'd rather your 548 followers not know where my iPad and I sleep each night. If you can muster the restraint, please don't check in here." Regular guests will get the hint, because if they don't, they won't be regulars any longer.
Hang a Sign
You know those Check in Here!" window clings you see on the door at Starbucks? This is the opposite of that. Apartment Therapy user finnlay128 let us know this was her preferred method in a comment to this post:
I have a sign at my flat that says 'Welcome! Make yourself at home and DO NOT check yourself in!"
It's a good strategy, especially if you're hosting a crowd and don't have time to sit down with each new guest to explain your Foursquare philiosophy.
Delete the Venue
Removing the venue is the most sure-fire way to prevent well-meaning friends from broadcasting your home address with a check-in. And if you're the one who created it, this is an easy one. On Foursquare, just head to your home or apartment's venue page at foursquare.com, click "edit venue" (located below the address), and then click the trash can to remove the venue from FourSquare's database. On Facebook Places, you can click "Edit Page" at the top of your venue's page, then head to "Your Settings" and look for a link that says something like, "Permanently delete this page." Voila!
If you didn't create your home's venue, you can still request it be removed. Both Foursquare and Facebook Places, have "Report a problem" or "Report Place" links that allow you to report that venue as your private residence and request it's data be removed. This method isn't instant, but you should have no trouble shutting down your home's check-in for good.
(Images: Rick Berk via Wikimedia Commons, Foursquare)
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"Sharing your address with 10 close friends for an intimate dinner party? No big deal. But when those 10 people each share your address with 500 relative strangers, you might begin to feel concerned about your privacy."
Oddly enough, if someone wants to find out my address all they have to do is look in the phone book or one of the online equivalents.
Is this seriously a problem for people? Anyone broadcasting my home address would not be invited back, but I'm not really friends with the kind of people who feel the need to let the entire world know where they are and what they're doing 24 hours/day anyway. The pictures and info some people think it appropriate to put online amazes me.
The difference between Facebook and Phonebook is that the phonebook knows virtually nothing else about you or your home, especially if you have a fairly common name.
With a check-in, it can be easily (electronically) determined where your home is, what it contains (if anyone took pictures at your party), and at least a partial list of attendees.
The insecurity of check-ins (vs a phonebook) comes from the ease with which someone can cross-reference so much information about you.
Possible Scenario - You're guests check in at your address and say, "Can't wait to party out tonight" - Every knows you guys are going to be out of the house. Now you have control over your friends list, but you have no control over you guests' friends list. You're putting a lot of faith in your guests to not have shady people in their social networks.
While I wouldn't want people checking in to my house for all sorts of privacy reasons, the whole looking you up in the phonebook thing is a very good point.
Sure, the phonebook doesn't have information about you, but once someone goes to whitepages dot com, they can put your address into zillow or any number of other sites and can see exactly what your house looks like, where it is, what the purchase history is, what it's estimated worth is, and what it looks like inside if it was on the market in the past several years and had pictures online.
Then, a simple google search with the name and the town you live in can easily pull up the names of your family members, spouse, etc.
I am bewildered that people would invite "friends" like this over at all. (I'm putting friends in quotes because people whose behavior appalls us in ways we don't know how to deal with are really more acquaintances than friends, are they not?) If your friends can't put this sort of relentless and vacuous self-promotion on hold to socialize at your house, it's time to get new friends. It's probably also time to stop going to concerts with those "friends" who hold their phones out the entire time and can't stop chattering about what great footage they're getting. And to stop going to the movies with those "friends" who loudly stage-whisper "what's going on NOW?!" every 15 seconds during suspenseful moments. It's OK to have friends whose company you actually enjoy. That's how friendship is supposed to work.
frogfood - hahahha.
I can't even stand it when people check me into places when we're out for dinner/drinks etc... If they put my home on there, I'd probably smack them upside the head.
hmm didn't know this app was available. if so, isn't that for public accomodation places? i have younger relatives (still in the party-hard phase) who upload photos of EVERYTHING... where they are, what they're doing/eating/drinking/watching, pictures of people and their homes AND where they are! enough already.
I have never been on facebook, or foursquare, and have never tweeted. And I never will!
Ditto!
Frogfood- I thought the same thing! Hahaha!
I have never been on facebook, or foursquare, and have never tweeted. And I never will!
Me either, I don't even have a computer.
"Oddly enough, if someone wants to find out my address all they have to do is look in the phone book or one of the online equivalents."
Word.
Anyone who wants to stalk you already has full legal access to your address, phone number, property tax records, deeds, birth certificate, marriage certificate, criminal record, workplace and, for some people, your annual salary.
@ busted - ditto
This definitely not an "issue" for anyone I know. But mostly, I'd be worried that someone who wasn't invited to the dinner party would see all their friends there, and be sad.
My sister insists upon "checking in" practically everywhere, and including those whom she is with every time. I usually just go back and delete that it shows up on my FB page, because it's never been done maliciously. She is just a chronic oversharer. "Eating a salad! Woo hoo!" Gimme a break.
BANGS - lol
KPAUPAU - that's my point, there are some things that just don't require the feedback of your friend's 100+ plus facebook 'friends'
I'm so glad that I am too old to have many friends who do this sort of thing...
Well, I've deleted my Facebook account, and don't have (yet) a Foursquare account, I'm so glad to have a privacy and meet a friend by coincidence on the street
Another solution, if you are in an area that is highly populated, is to create a venue/location for your subdivision, neighborhood, or apartment community, and ask people to use that to check in if they must. When I visit my parents, I check into the subdivision (and for the record, three of the 4 residents - all adults - at my parents' house use 4SQ). When I visit a couple I know, I check in to the "Court" that they live on, which is shared by several condominium buildings. It's not hard to set up ways to check in while still protecting peoples' privacy.