Yesterday, Facebook announced that they were opening up Facebook Places. If you’ve heard anything about the tech startups Gowalla or Foursquare, you’ll already understand the gist of it: using GPS enabled mobile devices, like an iPhone or a Droid smartphone, Facebook can now share with your friends your actual physical location in addition to a message, photo or other media you want to share. If you’re at a restaurant, for example, you can “check in” to the restaurant; it’ll broadcast the restaurant’s name, address and a picture on a map, similar to Google Maps, and a short message to all your friends on Facebook.
What’s a little bit different on Facebook is that your friends can check you in for you. So, for example, if one of your friends was with you at the restaurant, they could decide to check you into Places with them. This would still broadcast your location and information to your Facebook friends, as if you had done it yourself, even if you don’t have a smartphone.
Besides the obvious fact that you might not want to broadcast this kind of information, the main issue at play is that Facebook, as it usually does with new features, turns these new features on for you automatically so that you can begin using them. Fortunately, to their credit, they do offer a pretty strong privacy options for this feature, so that you can define who can actually see your updates and, more importantly, define who can check you in. Or, you can turn these new feature off completely.
A couple of key takaway points:
- Generally speaking, you can’t broadcast your location with Places using just your computer. You’re really only going to see this with smart phones.
- You (or your friends) get to decide when to check into Places. It’s not automatic, or tracking you.
- You have the ability to turn Places off or to limit it. By default, updates are only available to your friends, not the whole Internet.
- You (and your friends) can still and have always had the ability to tell people where you are on Facebook, without using Places. In the case of your friends, they could decide to do it without your permission, whether you’re even on Facebook or not.
The best thing we can do is just to raise awareness about these new features. People should know what they are getting into and know that they have the ability to control who gets to see their Places updates and who can check them into Places on Facebook.
