Facebook just recently unveiled their new location-based feature called Facebook Places. It allows your 'friends' to know where you are and at what time, making it easy to hook up and have some impromptu fun. However, there's a darker side to this feature you might want to know about before leaving this feature on.
While for most people who do some form of social networking, letting people in your Facebook 'friend' circle know where you are doesn't seem to be too big of an issue, but before you opt in, let's list the reasons why Facebook Places has created a slight furore.
1. Crime
My wife doesn't like walking the dog when it gets late and I can understand that it can get worrying late at night. You never know who you'll meet. Imagine that a stalker uses this location-based information to get to you. Let's say that it's not a stalker, but someone you just don't want to see, like an acquaintance or something like that. Even if it's not dangerous, it could become annoying.
2. More Crime
While I'm not worried about my friends coming to my home and fleecing me, I'm more concerned who exactly gets to know where I am. I distrust Big Brother, and wouldn't like to let anyone know where I always am, especially Facebook. This type of information can be used to burglar your home when you are away. This could be done by a friend of a friend, or some remote connection like that.
3. Unintentional Lies
There aren't many people who can say that they skipped out of work to have fun. The difference is that with Facebook Places, your employer, boss, or colleagues can be made aware of where you are and what you are doing. Let's say that you are taking a sick day to go to a concert, and then let your friends know inadvertently where you are. This can easily trickle back to your employer and colleagues, if they are part or attached to your social network.
4. Checking Other People In
You can check in your friends as being in the same location. Is this a bug or something that's a problem? It could be problematic, but you can easily un-tag yourself by editing your news feed. However, will everyone do this?
5. Changing Places' Names
Once a place has been entered in Facebook Places, it's unclear how you can change the name of it. Say for example, that as a joke, your home was entered as 'rehab center' or 'roach motel'. For now, it seems like it's not possible to change this.
Ultimately, Facebook Places was launched last week. Just like most of their other offerings, we're pretty sure that Facebook will find ways of resolving these concerns. However, I'll never opt in and would get annoyed if people started checking me in.
[images via Crunchgear and Read Write Web]
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Comments (8)
Even if you trust every single friend with Places, please don't opt in to allow other people to place you. You never know when someone malicious might hack into someone's account and decide. To make mischief.
I know this is the "communication" age, but why does everyone want everyone else to know everything about their life. Is this everyones 15 minutes of fame?
Range:
1. You can control who sees your posts by customizing your privacy settings
2. People can rob you when you're not home. By robbing you when you go to work, 5 days a week. No places needed there.
3. Don't lie. Or lie and understand how to tell a plausible one.
4. When facebook asks you if you want to allow someone to tag you, say no. or go into your settings and disallow everyone.
5. were you looking for a 5th reason ??
Honestly, I don't use the service because who the hell cares about my location but I do look at my FB privacy settings.
Is FB mandatory nowadays? Seems like the choice to opt out entirely is lost to most people.....
Im happy that i got out before i got hooked. Watching the hype from the outside is partly entertaining, partly scary.
I still have a Facebook account. It can be useful (rarely, I admit), but I fail to see the appeal of letting everyone know where you are at all times. I don't care where you just 'checked in', and I certainly wouldn't expect you to care about where I am.
The real problem I see with this is that it's opt-out, rather than opt-in. I had to go deep, deep, deep into my privacy settings to find out how to disable my friends from checking me in. I really hate how Facebook just assumes that I want to share every detail of my life with everyone I ever met in my life ever. Sorry, but I don't.
Think this is too personal of Facebook to do?
In the future, they want to know even more about you, I've heard that they will be trying to keep track of peoples heart rate one day! riddiculous!
Two of my daughters are teachers and don't have FB because they carefully guard their (good) reputations. They also warn students about what they put on their FB pages.
I find it highly annoying. I also dislike that it's intentionally hard to find the setting to keep others from checking you in.
10 years ago I had a few stalkery encounters, I certainly don't think that this is a good idea for that reason. If I *wanted* Foursquare I'd be *on* Foursquare.