Location-Based Services: Check-In to Facebook With "Facebook Places," ACLU Concerned Over Privacy
The latest in check-in services (available many others) now has Facebook in their marketplace. It will be interesting to see if check-in services catch-on with the masses (Facebook has 500 million users). Our guess, is no, it will not. While Facebook Places will be the introduction to check-in services for many our feeling is that it's not something the masses will hook into. What will be of equal interest is if users of GoWalla, Forsquare, and others will leave and move to Facebook?
What is Facebook Places about?
It’s not about broadcasting location to the world but sharing what you’re doing with friends.
+ You’ll be able to “tag friends” (and “check each other in”) at particular places. This may create privacy questions. Facebook assumes this will all be consensual. It’s clear that location tagging is positioned as a differentiating feature. You can only tag your friends only when you’re actually checking in to the same place. (Push notification when you’re tagged; you can remove any tag.)
Lots of warnings and privacy controls built into Places so that people can control when they expose location. “We have a comprehensive set of safeguards in place . . . default check in is to ‘friends only.’” Can be further “dialed-down” to a few specific people. Can remove check-ins from news feed.
In my tests, these settings worked fine. But I wished a couple of other settings were available. For example, you can't keep check-in notices off your Facebook page, unless you broadly block other kinds of status updates. And you can't block merchants from including your check-ins at their establishments on their Facebook pages. Also, while Places omits some annoying aspects of its competitors, like the game features, it's more stripped down and leaves out some attractive features others include. Foursquare has a feature that lets you leave suggestions about a location. And Gowalla has a "trips" feature that lets users string together places they've been into recommended tours.
Overall, I found Places a good enhancement to Facebook and one that will likely make the booming social network even more attractive to some.
Moments after Facebook introduced a new feature called Facebook Places Wednesday that allows its users to share their location and find their friends, advocates raised flags over online privacy.
The organization highlighted the element of the new service that allows users to “tag” a friend that is with them and post their location to Facebook – even if the accompanying friend does not have an iPhone, which is currently the only platform the application is available on.
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