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The First Thing You Should Do With Facebook Places: Don’t Let Other People Tag You
What’s worse than a location based service that lets everyone know when your not home? A location based service that lets your friends lie about you not being home.
Ok I’m not the biggest Facebook fan, but it’s a thing that everybody uses and I’m not exactly as anti social as I sometimes pretend to be. Or simply put it has it’s uses.
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But the new location based service they are rolling out within Facebook has me nervous. It used to be that location services like Foursquare or Gowala were opt-in basically because you had to have the right equip[ment and choose to be using the service. So if you were that savvy to begin with odds are you set up your settings so that you knew what other services that info was being shared with.
But Facebook is a whole other dealamabob. People use facebook like it was the interent, and unless you have taken the time to think about and set up your privacy, which until recently wasn’t easy to do, odds are you are 100% public.
So not only can anyone look you up by your real name, they can probably see your address and phone number, maybe some pictures of your kids that may or maynot include some items of interest in your house in the background of said pictures.
And now they know weather your home or not, not based on you telling them, but what on your friends might be telling them.
And of course your friends are all 100% honest, and would never say your at the bar or festival when you aren’t, not even as a joke.
So what’s worse than your nice home being robbed while your out? Well it being robbed while your home of course?
Now calm down, don’t panic this senario isn’t exactly likely, but depending on where you live, who you are, and who your friends are it’s not out of the realm of impossibility either.
I will tell you I upfront, I use a similar location based service called foursquare. But I don’t broadcast it to the world in where I am, only my friends know, and basically I use it to see where my friends are, or if anyone I know happens to be where I am so I can say hi.
But like I said, it’s a relatively small network compared to facebook, and the fact that the general population uses facebook, leads to, well lets face it a general ignorance as to what they are doing.
If I were you, I would protect myself. Click the link above to head over to the Gizmodo article and follow their directions on how to make sure no one but you can check you in anywhere. Then it might be time to review your friends list. I know the temptation to accept all friend requests is out there, but as these services get more and more personal, you really need think about who you are letting have the keys to this real time diary of your life.
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amazon.com: Understanding Privacy
