Facebook Users Raise Questions About "Places" Privacy

Unlike the situationin the previous rollout, Places does not reveal your data to everybody. A user has to "check in" when at a given place. When friends log in, they see that the user is in the area. Or if they are searching for something in that location, they see the user is there.

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Places also allows friends to "check you in," a feature that can be enabled and disabled at the user's discretion. However, there is no way to turning it off completely.

A statement from the Electronic Privacy Information Center said, "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; users must change several different privacy settings to restore their privacy status quo."

The organization recommends users disable the four options in the privacy tab if they do not want to reveal their locations.

The platform provides an API for other partners like Foursquare and Gowalla who can plug their users to check-in to Facebook's places. It also allows application providers a tool to build applications around the product.

Facebook currently does not allow advertisers to target users who check-in but allows them to target the ones who 'Like' their hosted page. Though merging a Page with a Place is not allowed currently, Facebook intends to directly contact the potential businesses for whom this may be possible.

Places just does not pool in location based contacts but also a lot of other content such as pictures, messages and comments thus creates history around the location. Such information is a valuable to a marketer.

However, several security concerns have come up regarding issues about location mapping and "geotagging."

Geotags, which give out information about a particular location of a person, can be embedded in photos or activated by people on Google, Flickr and other such sites. Potential thieves and stalkers could track these tags, raising doubts about whether people should use such apps which give information about their location.

Google launched a similar feature on its Maps called "Google Latitude" in 2009 which would help people share their location data with friends. Users were given the option to store their location history, or delete the entire content at one go. Google also launched an API in May this year which allowed certain applications to use the data, with the users' consent.

It is not clear what happens to the history of the locations a user has been in, nor the data collected when users "check in." Currently, there seems to be no way of deleting the location history.