Facebook rolls out “Places”, still doesn’t understand privacy
Last night, Facebook announced its “Places” feature which allows you to “check in” at places you’re at. If you’re hanging with friends at a club, you can tell everyone that you’re there by letting the Facebook iPhone app find your location via GPS, and then selecting the club you’re hanging at. It’s no different than Foursquare and Gowalla except that those two companies don’t have nearly the amount of users and social connectivity that Facebook does.
Facebook updated its iPhone app last night which has the new Places feature. Unfortunately, it’s not currently available in this part of the U.S. yet so I couldn’t test it. The demo Facebook put on last night showed that when you select the Places feature, it brings up a list of known places that are close to you. All you do is select the one you’re at and you’re done.
Facebook took checking in a step further by allowing you to check your friends in with you by tagging them the same way you tag them in Facebook’s Photos. If the place you’re at doesn’t exist in Facebook’s database, you can add it manually. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Not so fast.
If you don’t set your privacy settings, your friends can check you into a place without you knowing. That’s right, you can be tagged at a bar when you told a different group of friends you weren’t feeling well. In fact, someone can check you in without you knowing they saw you. We suggest you turn this feature off immediately.
Go to Account->Privacy settings. There, you’ll see the “Other things I share” section. There’s an option called “Friends can check me into places”. Set that to Disabled if you don’t want friends checking you in anywhere. The problem is that there’s no option for your approval to be tagged first. You can remove a tag, but by then it might be too late. Facebook needs a method for approving tags.
In the “Things I share” section, you can change who can see where you’ve checked in.
Again, Facebook falls short of understanding privacy. When asked whether you can remove a tag of your house, Facebook said that you can’t remove it; you’ll have to request a removal from Facebook by flagging it. Considering how long it takes them to respond to requests, this makes me a little nervous. If someone adds my house, I can’t remove it immediately. Facebook needs to have a system where I can say “this is my house, don’t associate places with my name in a 10 mile radius”.
We’re hoping that Facebook updates their privacy settings soon. While being tagged in pictures isn’t always done in real time, geolocation is, and can cause issues with friends that you don’t necessarily want. Facebook needs to look at their privacy settings as we’ve outlined. We’ll be testing Places as soon as it becomes available and report back as we gather more data on it.
Category: Social Media, Technology
