Facebook pissed in the faces of everyone’s privacy again yesterday by activating Places, which allows you and your so-called friends to check-in and announce your location on mobile devices — kinda like Yelp!, Gowalla and Foursquare, but with 500 million onlookers. The company claims it’s not about publicizing your location, it’s about promoting local businesses, socializing, and creating memories to share with your grandkids (awwww!). But it’s also definitely another revenue stream for the company that changes its privacy agreement every week and then lets blogs tell you about it. Yes, there’s overblown alarm about the program’s potential drawbacks, but tell that to a closeted teen, or a lesbian who likes to cheat. Here are five way Places it could make your life hell. And how to avoid them.
You’re a private person who prefers to keep your professional life and sex life separate — maybe you’re even a little, shall we say, closet-y. That’s fine: your sexuality, your business. So don’t share everything you do on Facebook. But what about your flamboyant drinking buddy Toni? Toni will check you in to locations just by tagging you the same way he would in a photograph. After a few tagged nights at the Kit-Kat club and LGBT community center, everyone will catch on to how you swing.
SOLUTION: Since you get email notifications every time you’ve been tagged, you can always “un-tag” yourself from a location. Or if you’re worried about it, you can opt out of the program altogether.
Google Maps already makes it very easy for someone to locate your address and even see the facade of your house; Bing lets you see the bird’s eye view. Now local no-goodniks and frenemies can see in real-time when you’re not home and ransack your house. Or wait for you with a nailbat to return home. Fun.
SOLUTION: Right now Google allows for people in Germany to make their houses invisible on maps. But until they allow everyone else to that, don’t approve strangers or vindictive drama queens (like Michael Lucas). De-friend enemies immediately and also change your social settings so that only friends can see what’s on your profile.
Are you the sort of person who skips work and social obligations to go see Eat Pray Love and attend “Leatherbitch Night” at the Eagle? Now everyone and your mom will be able to see just where you were when you should have been working late or at her Shabbat dinner.
SOLUTION: You could just be a person of your word and actually do work or attend dinner when you promise. Or you could continue being a flake and judiciously choose what Facebook places you share. Instead of sharing every time you go out for happy hour or Haagen Dazs, post that you were doing community service at the children’s hospital — you’ll go from jerk to hero in no time! Of course you actually need to be in physical proximity to said children’s hospital to check in there, but surely there’s a drink special nearby.
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Your comedian pals could easily check you into sex museums, your ex-lover’s house, or the local dungeon whenever they please. Won’t everyone freak out when they seen you’ve been at Madame Bambi’s Double-Ended Pleasure Palace?
SOLUTION: Make better friends. Let them know how much you severely disapprove of their immature behavior, and then go slash their tires. Then start a Facebook campaign to inform everyone of their douchebaggery.
I’ve recently noticed an increase in the hookerbots and spam coming into my Facebook inbox. Since Facebook’s goal is really just to create a living biography of your social history and then sell that information to advertisers, you can be sure their next “update” will sell collect and reveal even more personal details to the highest bidder. This isn’t technophobia, just the way Facebook does business.
SOLUTION: After learning more about digital privacy from the ACLU, privatize as much of your Facebook data as possible. Or better yet stop using Facebook (though we know that’s not gonna happen).
Mike in Asheville, nee "in Brooklyn"
“5 Ways Facebook Places Is Bad For Gays (And How To Stop Them)”
Is this English?
Hilarious
Solution: Stop using Facebook.
People act like it’s something they’re owed. It’s a free service that isn’t obligated to give anyone anything.
If you want to keep in contact with real friends you actually talk to there’s your cell, instant messaging, Twitter(even if I think Twitter is stupid), actually meeting your friend in person, and email(yeah I know it’s so archaic).
Facebook like Twitter and all of these other “social networking” sites are for attention whores and advertisers. There’s literally no reason to use them outside of “Hey everybody! Look over here!” mentality.
There are plenty of ways to update the people you care about(and care about you) privately with all the risks.
byufag
Thank you thank you.
I’ve changed my setting on the fucking facebook.
Roger Rabbit
They missed the biggest one –
Farmville addicts at home are Farmville addicts at work, and all the hiring managers will see the activity to determine how much you will be doing Facebook at work.
Yuki
There’s an easy solution to stop this if you use Facebook:
Opt out of any programs, and add only people you know.
It’s as simple as that. This article reads, to me, like fearmongering.
Marcus
@Yuki:
I agree.
BTW, if people are SO worried about being found out on Facebook, privacy or whatever, I know of an even simpler solution:
Get off of Facebook altogether.
whiz
A closeted teen or a lesbian who likes to cheat?
Stereotype much?
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
After a more than a little bitter ex got all Basic Instinct on me and tracked me down via MySpace after what I thought was a good 3000 mile buffer I swore off these sites forever…….
bitter ex
oh there you are
:)
Twitter is 1000x better anyways
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@bitter ex: curses! :p
mark snyder
Places isn’t going to out anyone! People will out themselves if they choose to share where they are. Come on.This is a nonstory.
Lexy
Hell, I outed myself on facebook just to avoid standing up at thanksgiving and making an awkward speech. ty facebook!
B
No. 2 · Hilarious wrote, “Solution: Stop using Facebook. People act like it’s something they’re owed. It’s a free service that isn’t obligated to give anyone anything.”
Suppose you used a “free service” and later found that this service had tricked you into giving it the password for your google/yahoo/etc account and had read all your email, at least to the point of recording subject lines and contacts, whether in your address book or not, and then started spamming these contacts.
Free or not, there are some reasonable limits on what they should be allowed to do.
BubbasBack
What is a FacebooK?
Sceth
From the article: “De-friend enemies immediately…”
Its premise is sad because it’s funny. It’s funny because it’s true.
Aaron in Honolulu
Is it just me or did the nerd who invented Facebook get buff?
Schteve
Oh my, where to begin with where Queerty has gone wrong on this one?
1) “It could out you to friends, family, and your boss.”
Considering you have control over where you are tagged, at best you’re identified at being at a gay bar from your friend’s post on his own wall. And that’s no different than if he updated his own status with “at the gay bar with so-and-so”. Still, if you are afraid of being outed, I would surely hope you’ve told your friends you are in the closet and they will know not to tag you nilly-willy.
2) “It could make it easier for stalkers, thieves, and bashers to find you.”
Only if you have stalkers, thieves, and bashers as Facebook friends. The default setting for Places access is friends-only, so if this is the case then I have many suspicions about you given the activities your friends partake in.
3) “Your constant irresponsibility is now apparent to everyone.”
If you are seriously dumb enough to check in somewhere you shouldn’t be then you deserve the consequences. Again, it’s no different than posting a status update to the same effect. Facebook isn’t forcing you to check in at every place you go or anything.
4) “It could allow your jerkoff friends to play horrid social pranks on you.”
Why are you Facebook friends with someone who does that anyway? They would be removed in a heartbeat. Still, a friend cannot check you in unless he checks in at the same place. Now I ask will raise more eyebrows, a Facebook post stating that your roommate said you were at a sex museum, or a Facebook post stating that your roommate said he himself was at a sex museum?
5) “You become a spam haven.”
Facebook doesn’t give any information at all to advertisers. Advertisers merely select specific demographics or interests they want to target, and Facebook shows their add to people who meet those requirements. Advertisers do not know that you ever saw their add.
declanto
@BubbasBack: You are such a treasure 😀
j
@bitter ex: I lol’d.
Michael
If you don’t want to be found, and are not interested in social interaction, but just love Facebook, build out your page on a LAMP stack on your PC, and enjoy meeting yourself.
fredo777
@bitter ex: lmfao
fredo777
@Hilarious: “There’s literally no reason to use them outside of “Hey everybody! Look over here!” mentality.”
Sorry, but that is rubbish. I find facebook a great way to keep in touch w/ lots of former classmates, etc., all in one convenient place. I don’t necessarily want to pick up a phone + have a full conversation w/ everyone in my social network or even send out e-mail to them all, when I can just shoot them a brief comment on their wall. I think these sites only get a bad rep b/c of the way certain people (not all) choose to use them.
Bryan
google maps doesn’t allow people to see your house in real time, they have cars with cameras go through and the images are usually 6 months old or so. does queerty think that they have webcams pointed at your house at all time? do you ever bother to fact check?
Corve DaCosta
I hate FB
Nick de Casa
I really, really don’t like Facebook.
I’m 20, and my generation has become completely consumed by it. It’s bad enough going out for a drink with a friend and having them texting every five minutes, but to have them checking facebook is even worse.
It has its uses, but do I think it’s making life better, do I think it’s making society better? No.
I deleted mine a while back, but eventually I caved in, and reopened it. As a university student, you have to have it. Your social life seriously suffers without it. As soon as I get my degree, I’m deleting it.
One of the great things about leaving school/uni, is that you no longer have to pretend to like people you didn’t, you no longer have to hear about their lives, no longer have to put up with them knowing everything about you. I want those people to not know what I’m up to, and I want to not know what they’re up to.
seaguy11
Maybe its time for the closet cases to come out and quit bitching at Facebook??
L.
It’s not as simple as ‘opting out’ – leaving aside that FB has the bad habit of makings users opt out instead of opt in – because there is way for people to tag you in Places without you agreeing to it.
It’s apparently due to a weird thing that happens the first time someone tags out, and you either dismiss the message telling out so, or you don’t even get it.
From then on, all your friends can tag you and you won’t get further warnings. (There was a post on one of the Gawker sites about that, can’t find it now.)
Blue Falcone
@Nick de Casa: “One of the great things about leaving school/uni, is that you no longer have to pretend to like people you didn’t, you no longer have to hear about their lives…”
Only if you’re unemployed.
But seriously, fuck facebook and get a real life.