Facebook Places: On Being Ratted Out By Your Friends

I am always hesitant – and there’s always a twinge in my Orwellian brain – when I read that a company crated a ‘feature’ that allows me to tell you where I am. If I want to tell you I am at Starbucks, I will. If I don’t want to, I won’t.  Now, however, I don’t have to tell you where I am. You can tell people where I am. And I don’t have to give you permission to do it. Welcome to the new world of tethering. Welcome to Facebook’s Places.

One of the big concerns about technology is the way in which it impacts our lives, particularly how it impacts our working lives when we aren’t working (or when we aren’t supposed to be working). When doing my IT research, work-life conflict was a central concern for these people, because they were tethered to the workplace with pagers, phones, and laptops home nightly. 

This tethering to the workplace allows for flexibility on the one hand, but also creates work-time conflicts. They are contacted throughout their off-time and connected continually through their laptops and other mobile communication devices. Missed dinners. Interrupted dates. Late night calls about. Always being on-call. Tethered.

The hope was to emancipate (or at least spread the awareness) that working in IT did not necessarily have to be dominated by the technology – that the choice could be made to “tune in turn on drop out” as Tim Leary said. Dr. Leary also said “The PC is the LSD of the 1990s.” I wonder what he would think about Facebook, Google, Apple.

Heck, the laptop, then the cell phone, liberated me in many ways, allowing me to do work, make and receive phone calls, share e-mails and browse the Web from just about anywhere without anyone knowing where I was or what else I was doing. So why would I welcome anything that blows my cover?

The Places tool, part and parcel of the Facebook mobile application, was released last week.  As always Facebook assured everyone that they could opt out of using the product. Places does offer the end-user control, as they must purposely check their location in as they wonder the world. You are not updated in Places automatically. However…

(have you noticed that when it comes to technology there is always a however)

…by using Places, friends can give your location whenever and wherever they want. So lets say we are hanging at the City Diner on South Grand. Although you don’t want certain people to know where you are (because let’s face it, there are some whacked out people wandering around south city at 3 am), your friends can check you in. Guess what? Anyone who wants to find out where you are now has that information readily available.

Places makes it easy for your friends to violate your privacy, because the updates are not controlled by Your FB privacy settings, but by your friend’s privacy settings.

Sure you can untag yourself, like you can untag yourself in photographs. Of course when we do, we always wonder “How long was that picture of me with the dwarf and the monkey up on Billy’s page?”  Do you want the world to know you are not home? Do want more mobile advertising headed your way? Do you want this person knowing where you are? Or even worse - this one? Or even this one? Despite Facebook’s claim that “no location information is associated with a person unless he or she explicitly chooses to become part of location sharing. No one can be checked in to a location without their explicit permission” I can obviously check you in, whether you like it or not.

There are two ways to grow a business. You can create something so cool and so worthwhile that the herd rushes to by it. (Think Apple’s iPod.) Or you can have a business that millions of people already use and then force them to use your new creation. (Think Microsoft when it bundled Internet Explorer into Windows, making it the default browser and destroyed Netscape in the process.)

Facebook is going with the second option.

If you want to deal with your privacy in Places, go here.

Remember, you haven’t been tagged. 

You haven't even been tethered.  

Located. 

Fixed. 

Situated. 

Fingered. 

Designated. 

Cornered. 

Ratted Out.

You've been Placed.