Before Facebook entered the world of location-sharing, I wish it had given more thought and care to privacy issues.
Location-sharing services allow mobile Internet users to "check in" and announce their location to members of their social network. Among the providers are companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Where and Yelp. Some of these offer inducements such as virtual prizes or even real-world coupons to get you to check in.
Right now, only a small minority of consumers use these services. But the number may get a lot larger now that Facebook, with its 500 million worldwide members, earlier this month launched its own location-sharing service, dubbed Places.
Facebook users can access Places through an iPhone application or through a version of the company's mobile website and then share their whereabouts -- and those of friends with them -- with their Facebook contacts. And through a feature dubbed "Here Now," users can see which other Facebook users have recently checked into the same location.
Facebook decided to build Places after seeing that many users were already sharing where they were and who they were with, said company representative Meredith Chin. With Places, she noted, Facebook users can find nearby friends and discover new places to visit or eat.
But sharing one's location has huge privacy implications. Crooks would love to know when a house's owners are far away and stalkers would love to know where their victims are. On the flip side, a husband out shopping for a gift for his wife probably doesn't want her to know where he is. And those with an unlisted address -- celebrities, say -- certainly don't want their home locations broadcast to people they don't know.
Chin said Facebook thought through these issues and gives users control over when and with whom they share their location. Facebook won't share its users' location unless they "check in" at particular sites using the Places feature, she noted, so users don't have to worry that their whereabouts will be broadcast continuously.
Users can also limit who has access to their location. For instance, they can configure Places so only a select group of their contacts is alerted when they have checked in somewhere. And they can turn off the "Here Now" feature.
Having criticized Facebook for its approach to privacy in the past, I'm happy to see it put more thought into privacy with Places. But the company still hasn't done nearly enough.
By default, Places allows any of your Facebook contacts to share your location with any of their contacts. So your location could be broadcast by someone you barely know to a bunch of people you don't know at all -- or, worse, to people you know but don't want to disclose your whereabouts to.
Facebook does allow you to disable this feature, but it's either on or off. There's no in-between. You can't configure the feature so only some of your Facebook contacts can share your location. Nor can you configure it so your contacts can share your location only with mutual friends.
Worse, Facebook by default will allow your contacts to share your location. The first time this happens, the company is supposed to notify you and give you the opportunity to turn off the service. But if you're like many Facebook users, you may use the site rarely -- if at all -- and may not see the notification until long after the fact, if ever.
The "Here Now" feature also gives users only a binary choice. They can either share their location with any other nearby Facebook user -- or with no one. The site doesn't allow users to limit who gets their "Here Now" information to just their friends or people in their network. Nor does it allow users to block particular individuals from seeing their "Here Now" location.
What's more, Places doesn't give you an easy way to adjust who gets access to your location information on a case-by-base basis.
You may want the whole world to know that you're attending the Coldplay concert, but you may want only a close group of neighborhood friends to know you are at the local pub. But there's no simple way to set those limits on the fly; instead, you would have to dig deep into your privacy settings before each check-in, which is something you can't do from the Facebook's iPhone application.
These issues point to a bigger problem with Places in particular and Facebook in general. When the company adds new features, it isn't doing so with privacy foremost in mind. Quite the opposite. Facebook has a vested interest in having users share as much information about themselves as possible; that's what the company's business model is built on.
That encourages the company to push users to share ever more information, and discourages it from giving users all the tools they might need or want to control who gets access to their information.
It almost makes you want to hide.
