The launch of Facebook Inc.’s Places location service this week sparked new privacy concerns about the popular social network. But the company’s efforts to mollify critics before the launch stemmed some of the blowback.
August 25, 2010
By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Places is a feature that lets users share their physical locations with Facebook friends, but it also allows users to identify friends at those locations. By default, each Facebook member can be tagged at a location by friends until the member changes his or her account’s privacy settings.
The result is that a Facebook member can use a smartphone to “check in” at a nearby location and record that another friend is at that place as well, whether that person is actually at the location or not. That prompted some privacy advocates to advise Facebook users to disable the feature soon after its debut.
Cameron Hiebert, a 36-year-old in Lima, Ohio, said he likes the idea of being able to share his location on Facebook, but not the fact that friends can tag each other, even if they’re not physically at that place with them. As an experiment, he created a fictional place called “Cameron’s Naughty Little House of Perversion and Love,” and tagged five of his friends (as well as himself) as being at that place.
“It is a huge privacy concern,” he said, noting he had already turned off the setting that would allow others to tag him.
Facebook, which changed its privacy controls following a torrent of criticism in May, defended the new feature and said it had consulted a dozen privacy and safety groups before it went live on Wednesday with Places.
(This story and related background material will be available on The Wall Street Journal Web site, WSJ.com.)
Tagging friends in status updates, Facebook said, was a norm on the website even before Places. With location, the company said, it added notification for the person being tagged and the ability to remove individual tags or turn off tagging completely. It also requires that the person doing the tagging place themselves at the location.
“If you have a friend that is tagging you in illicit places, you can tell them to stop, or you can de-friend that person, or block them entirely,” said Ana Yang, a Facebook Places product marketing manager.
Many privacy groups said they were pleased that Facebook had limited Places to voluntary check-ins–rather than constant real-time tracking of users’ locations–and also that the service set defaults for much of the shared information to be limited to a user’s circle of friends.
Still, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, one of the groups briefed by Facebook about the product before its launch, said Facebook didn’t give users adequate controls.
“After all of the privacy uproar earlier this year, Facebook is clearly thinking more about privacy–that is why we were surprised and disappointed that they did not resolve these issues that were technically possible,” said Nicole Ozer, the group’s technology and civil-liberties policy director.
She said Facebook should make it easier for users to control the feature that allows their friends to tag them at a location by providing a clear “don’t allow” option when a friend first tags them at a location. Currently, a user can accept the tag or defer the decision. But if no action is taken, the default is for the information to be shared with friends.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the company has had ongoing discussions with privacy and safety groups. For the Places launch, it briefed a wider group that included some past critics. “We always recognized that location information is one of the most sensitive topics,” he said. “We feel good about the result.”
On Friday, Facebook brought two of the privacy advocates it consulted, from ConnectSafely.org and the Future of Privacy Forum, onto a stage with them for an online video broadcast from the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters to highlight the company’s privacy efforts.
During the broadcast, Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a group that addresses cyber-bullying and other youth online issues, said he had recommended that Facebook add additional precautions for minors using Places.
He suggested that it automatically limit use by minors under the age of 18 of a “here now” feature, which broadcasts one’s location to a wide set of Facebook users also in that pace. Facebook complied, and Places automatically limits sharing such information just to those minors’ confirmed friends.
“We appreciate the fact that you actually took our advice,” Magid told Facebook’s Yang at the event. “We weren’t just window dressing.”
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedoms group in San Francisco that was prebriefed about Places, described the product launch as a “good step forward” from the way that Facebook has launched new products in the past.
“We had a constructive dialogue with Facebook,” he said, though the company didn’t integrate all of his suggestions. On Thursday, Opsahl posted a blog post that warned users to think about the implications of sharing location with everyone from ex-lovers to business competitors.
Ray Lin, a 24-year-old in New York City, said he liked the idea that Places would let him tell friends where he is without calling or sending a text message. “It is an easy way to say, ‘Hey, I am here,'” he said, adding he was OK with the idea that friends could tag him, so long as he could remove the tags later if he wanted.
Todd Rosenthal, a 38-year-old Facebook user in Sacramento, said he wasn’t going to use Places. “I don’t really have any desire for people to know where I am all the time,” he said, adding he felt Facebook’s default privacy settings were too loose.
(Robert A. Guth contributed to this article.)