This one seems worse than others and potentially far more dangerous than, say, hooker ads on craigslist. Facebook may be disclosing your location data, whether or not you want that to happen.
From the Electronic Privacy Information Center:
The recently announced Facebook service Places makes user location data routinely available to others, including Facebook business partners, regardless of whether users wish to disclose their location. There is no single opt-out to avoid location tracking. The default settings of this new tool allow user data to be disclosed in a number of ways that are not immediately clear to users. Facebook has put a complicated set of new privacy settings in place to deal with the “Places” tool. Additionally, Facebook allows anyone to create a location on the system, which means anyone could add the location of a person’s home or business to the website without the person’s knowledge.
By default, Facebook has enabled Places for all users. If a user chooses to “check in” from a mobile device, that user’s location is published to that user’s news feed. If the option “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” is selected, the user’s location also appears on the public page of the location, available to everyone. This setting is enabled by default for those who have previously set some of their other information available to everyone.
If a user checks in, that user can “tag” a number of friends as also being at the same location. The default behavior for users tagged by their friends is very confusing. Those users who have taken no action with respect to this setting will receive an email and a prompt with the options to “allow” or “not now.” Those who choose “allow” are automatically set to allow all future check-ins by friends. Those who choose “not now” are still tagged as being at the location, just not “checked in.” Users are also tagged immediately when the check-in takes place, although the tags may be removed once users become aware of them. A user who has ever used Places to check in is automatically set to allow check-ins by friends.
By default, check-in information is also available to the third-party developers of applications that a user has authorized, as well as to the third-party developers of applications that a user’s friends have authorized.
Additionally, At the Coca-Cola Village Amusement Park in Israel, visitors were recently issued bracelets with RFID chips that linked to their Facebook accounts. RFID readers scattered throughout the park updated the users’ Facebook pages when the bracelets were scanned and on-site photographers posted photos that were automatically tagged with the users’ identities.
For users who do not want location information revealed to others, EPIC recommends that Facebook users: (1) disable “Friends can check me in to Places,” (2) customize “Places I Check In,” (3) disable “People Here
Now,” and (4) uncheck “Places I check in to” from the list of settings accessible to applications through your friends.
EPIC, joined by many consumer and privacy organizations, has two complaints pending at the Federal Trade Commission concerning Facebook’s unfair and deceptive trade practices, which are frequently associated with new product announcements.
I followed EPIC’s recommendations. I don’t need to hide where I go, but it’s really not the business of marketers or the world.
