Facebook recently launched a new feature called Places that lets you and your friends track locations simlar to the popular Foursquare site. If you’d prefer to keep your location private, or at least stop your friends from posting it, here’s how. Why is this important? Take a quick look at PleaseRobMe, and you’ll understand.
Check-ins aren’t always a bad thing, if managed with care. It’s entirely up to you whether or not you want to disable them. The problem is, Facebook simply assumes that you want to participate in all of their new privacy-reducing features and enabled them by default. However, if you want to opt-out, or would like a bit more control over your locaiton info, it’s pretty easy to do through your privacy settings as demonstrated in the above video from Lifehacker.
Login to Facebook, choose Privacy Settings from the Account menu in the upper-right corner, and click on the Custom option if not already selected. Then click on the Customize Settings link at the bottom, next to the small pencil image.
At the bottom of the Things I Share heading, there are two items you may want to change. The default setting for Places I check in is usually “Friends Only.” To increase your privacy, use the drop down menu — I selected Customize, then Only Me.
Below that is a check-box for Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in. Uncheck “Enable” so people weon’t know when you’re at a particular location when they do a search for people near them or when looking at the location’s page.
Finally, if you don’t want your friends to be able to check you into Places and sharing your location based on their preferences, scroll down the the Things Others Share section. If you don’t want anyone checking you in to places without your knowledge — or to some place you may not actually be — its a good idea to disable it.
Its important to note that your location can be shared by your friends’ applications, too. You’ll need to go to a completely different section to disable them. Click the Edit your settings link under the Applications and Websites header at the bottom-left of the Choose Your Privacy Settings page. Then go to the Info accessible through your friends section, and click Edit Settings. You’ll find a bunch of check-boxes for a variety of settings — those that are checked are available to Facebook applications being used by your friends. Places I check in to is the last check-box in the list. Uncheck it if you don’t want your friends’ applications grabbing/using your locaiton info, too.
A lot of people find this last part a bit confusing, so here’s a short video, created by Lifehacker, demonstrating how to change your application settings.
Pretty easy to opt-out, but it’s sad that Facebook automatically opt’d us all in, in the first place.
If you have any questions about this, or anything else, feel free to put it in the comments, below, and I’ll do my best to answer it.