How To Prevent Facebook Places From Revealing Your Location
Facebook has introduced a FourSquare-like feature that allows you to share your immediate physical location with your friends. Unfortunately, it defaults into sharing this information whether you want it to or not.
This feature has sparked a new round of debates over Facebook privacy, with the ACLU of Northern California issuing a statement saying, “In the world of Facebook Places, ‘no’ is unfortunately not an option.”
Facebook Places allows you to share your location with the click of a button, which works particularly well with smart phones and other mobile devices. However, even if you don’t post a location yourself, a friend could still tag you with location information which would then be visible to others. Unless you intend to use Facebook Places, I encourage you to disable it. Facebook says they have made it easy to do so, but the process seems non-intuitive.
- First, go to Account, then Privacy Settings in the upper right hand corner. Click the “Customize Settings” link. Under “Things I Share,” change “Places I check in” to “Only me” and uncheck the Enable box for “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.” Under “Things Others Share,” change “Friends can check me in to Places” to Disabled.
- Go to Account, Privacy Settings and click “Edit my settings” under “Applications and Web sites” at the bottom of the screen. Next to “Info accessible through your friends,” click “edit settings” and uncheck “Places I’ve Visited.”
I also suggest that you do not set your account permissions to Everyone, as it leaves your information wide open. In the computer security world we advise that security settings always default to maximum rather than minimum, a policy I wish Facebook would follow.
You’ll have to take your Facebook security into your own hands by routinely reviewing your Privacy Settings, because they may change as Facebook introduces new features or upgrades old ones. And remember, privacy on the Internet is a meaningless term. Expect that anything you post on Facebook or elsewhere can be revealed, and don’t say anything that you don’t want to be public knowledge.
When thinking about privacy on FaceBook, consider this: Users are FB’s product, which they sell to advertisers. Anything the users request is secondary to what FB’s *customers* (said advertisers) require.
That’s right, Peter. Facebook touts new features like this as benefits to users, but really the users are secondary to Facebook’s real purpose of making money through advertisements. While Facebook does provide services people want to use (social networking), I have to wonder if we are too willing to do the advertisers’ work for them, collating data on ourselves for them to use to market to us.
Thanks for great information!
Anytime, Martha!