Up for Debate: Facebook Places
August 25, 2010 by Andrea Bennett
Where are you now? If you’re a Facebook user, that question became a little easier for the 499,999 million other users to answer last week—and kicked off yet another set of concerns among privacy advocates.
Facebook Places is a location-based social feature that, like Foursquare and Gowalla, lets users check in at places and advertise their location to friends. Like the other networks, Places users can check in via iPhone and send their location to Facebook from, say, a restaurant, club, or museum and see other people who have checked in at the same place and have agreed to advertise their location.
The problem, according to privacy advocates, is that you can also “tag” a friend and post his or her location to Facebook— even if your friend doesn’t have an iPhone and hasn’t necessarily opted in to the service. Close on the heels of the launch, the ACLU released a statement expressing its concerns:
“Places allows your friends to tag you when they check in somewhere, and Facebook makes it very easy to say ‘yes’ to allowing your friends to check in for you,” read the statement, released late Wednesday night. “But when it comes to opting out of that feature, you are only given a ‘not now’ option. ‘No’ isn’t one of the easy options.”
The organization also warned that Facebook had already opened up location data to third party sites: “This means that your friends’ apps may be able to access information about your most recent check-in by default as soon as you start using Places.” It also provided a Places resources page for managing your privacy settings.
And if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized in a press conference for the launch that “The main thing we are doing is allowing our users to share where they are in a really nice and social way,” some are more focused on the potential that location-based social networks have for doing harm.
In this article for the U.K. newspaper the Guardian, for instance, writer Leo Hickman used Foursquare to “cyberstalk” a public relations executive and expose the dangers of opening yourself up to others who would be doing the same thing for more nefarious purposes. Having located her on Foursquare and cross-referenced her on Google and Twitter, Hickman says, “Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.”
While the new Facebook feature, according to this New York Times article, is anticipated to help the company compete with Google, other location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp so far see Places as yet another distribution channel.
What do you think of Facebook’s new Places feature and other location-based social networks? Are they fun or unnerving? And is it responsible to tag someone’s location without their consent?
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3 Comments
What do you think? Leave a comment
August 31, 2010 by Dee
They are neither fun nor unnerving, they are just plain pointless. Why do you need everyone to know where you are every second of the day? If you're going to meet someone for lunch, send them a text via your cell phone or even a private message on Facebook, why do you need to advertise where you are to every single one of your friends? This says more about people's egos than anything else. Facebook, Twitter, etc are just a means for self-important people to post their every insignificant thought. There's a lot more important things going on in the world than which coffee shop you just "checked in" to. And as for cyber stalkers, people need to realize that the internet is NOT private in any way shape or form. If you indicate where you can be found every minute of the day, it's your fault if someone stalks you. Don't blame Facebook Places, just because the app is there, doesn't mean you have to use it.
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January 20, 2011 by Camelie
Why someone would like to share every minute of his life where he/she goes or does using Facebook when their cell-phone built-in GPS would be enough?
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February 21, 2011 by atul bhagat
i m in luv with green earth
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