Following on from the success of location based services such as Foursquare, Facebook has decided to launch their own version to allow its virtual world to take one step closer to each user’s offline existence.
Facebook Places, due to be rolled out over the next few weeks, will enable you to “check in” from your smart phone and broadcast your location to your Facebook friends. You will also be able to tag friends at the same location as you and look up the locations of friends who are similarly “checked in”, either via status updates or on a separate web page.
The launch of this application has resulted in privacy issues bubbling to the surface once again. The good news is that Facebook will allow users to block Places functions in their privacy settings if they want to. The real question is, how many consumers actually know how to change these settings?
Here are a few simple steps to tighten up your security settings on Facebook:
- There are a couple of things that you can never hide on Facebook, including name, profile picture, location, connections and hobbies. Make sure that you are comfortable with the information that you have included in each of these sections. You also have the option to leave some of them blank.
- To edit your privacy settings, click on “Account” in the top right of the page. Then select “Privacy settings” from the drop down list and select “Custom” from the left side of the page. Click on “Customize settings” to view and change your privacy options. One of these options is “Places I check in to” which is relevant to the location based application mentioned above.
- To select the level of privacy you want for each section, choose one of the drop down options on the right hand side:
- Although “Friends of Friends” sounds harmless, it refers to everyone that your friends have added as friends, and all it takes is one careless friend to give a dodgy person access to all your information and photos.
- You can control what information applications can access and remove all unwanted applications. To do this, go to Privacy Settings –> Applications, Games and Websites.
- Decide whether you are comfortable to have your Facebook profile appear when people enter your name in to search engines. You can also edit this setting from the Applications, Games and Websites section of your Privacy Settings.
Sources: news24.com; Connect Magazine. Image sources: facebook.com
