Facebook Places: Useful or Concerning?

Comparing and contrasting in today's news sources has become commonplace when determining whether or not one product is better the other, one alternative is safer than another, and so on. This is strongly evident in a recent article discussing Facebook Places and whether or not the location based service is over-sharing information.

The issue at hand when it comes to Facebook Places is privacy. How much privacy is worth giving up for another service? Should friends be able to announce to potentially hundreds of people where you are without your consent at any given time? These are questions that are raised by many concerned groups who worry about people stalking them or crimes being carried out using information from a site such as Facebook.

However, those who support Facebook Places argue a very good point: Facebook does give you the option to turn the service off. They feel that if a user has a problem with the way in which Facebook implements the service, then the user should simply not use the service.

In the end, the many people agree that the option should be left up to the individual user. Each person should be able to evaluate the situation themselves using the compare and contrast technique, and ultimately come up with their own decision. Unfortunately, those who are not very tech savvy may have trouble figuring out how to disable or enable these settings, and when a service such as this is enabled by default, even the little time they must spend on figuring out how to change the setting can have them concerned.

In my opinion, Facebook should change the way it selects the default settings. Facebook Places should be disabled by default, if only to allow for the peace of mind of the individuals who are skeptical of people knowing their location. However, outside of that, maybe it would not be such a bad idea to leave the ultimate decision up to individual users. If users invest time in learning the pros and cons of each situation, they will be able to make better decisions later on, and it in the case of this article, better understand what effect each decision has on your privacy.

Refer to the original article here:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/03/facebook.places.reaction/index.html