How to protect yourself from Facebook Places

After earlier roll-outs in the USA and Japan, Facebook has now opened up its location-sharing service in the UK.

In a breakfast briefing in London, Facebook explained that the new service would make it easier for users to share where they were.

But hang on a minute – I don’t want to share where I am. And I don’t want other people to be able to share my location either.

I came back late last night after a few days away on a business trip, to find that my next door neighbour had been burgled. So I want to have total control over when (and if) my location is shared and who gets told my location.

What I certainly don’t want is Facebook once again assuming that I wish to have features turned on by default (in this case, some of the features of Facebook Places), and the onus to be on me to recheck my privacy settings.

And I don’t want friends to be able to “tag” me, checking me in to a particular location. Facebook, however, enabled that by default.

And I don’t want the…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.