Facebook Places knows where Waldo is!

If the latest viril Facebook status is any indication, Waldo will have no place to hide thanks to Facebook Places, and neither will your kids.

Facebook launched Facebook Places yesterday. Anyone can find out where you are when you are logged in. It gives the actual address & map location of where you are as you use Facebook. Make sure your kids know!!! TO UNDO: go to "Account Settings", ..."Notifications", then scroll down to "Places" a...nd uncheck the 2 boxes. Make sure to SAVE changes and re-post this!! Stay safe!

First of all, Facebook Places was launched about a week and a half ago. But that's a moot point.

If you follow those instructions, what you are actually doing is disabling two notifications for Facebook Places. One notifies you when someone tags you, and the other notifies you when someone comments on one of your Places visits.

If you're paranoid about the whole concept of Facebook Places, wouldn't you want to be notified of these things?

As I mentioned in previous blog post, when Facebook Places came out, the default setting is not enabled. I say "not enabled" rather than disabled because the setting for mine was neither enabled or disabled, it was waiting for me to pick one.

Apparently there is some uncertainty about whether or not it really is disabled if you don't pick one, so if you'd like to make sure and disable it yourself, see my original blog post, describing step-by-step how to do that. Or look it up on the web; there are other sites that describe where to find the option in your Facebook Privacy settings.

Checking out of checking in Places on Facebook

Thanks to Misty for bringing attention to this new Facebook feature.

Facebook is adding a new feature called Places, similar to FourSquare that some people use with Twitter. It allows a person to share their location with friends via their mobile phone.

You can read more about Facebook Places in this Washington Post article.

For the most part, it's something you would have to intentionally use and you may not need to do anything else to your privacy settings since it supposedly defaults to Friends Only. The feature that could worry some people is the ability to check-in their friends. Your friend could check you in to locations that you may not want others to know about. However, according to the Post article, "your friends can't start tagging you as being present until you authorize that activity."

If you want to make sure, here how to Disable that feature.

First go into your Privacy Settings:

Privacysettings
Then into Customize Settings:

Sharingonfacebook
Scroll down and look for Friends can check me int to Places under Things others share:

Thinsgothersshare
To the right of that there is a dropdown you can set to Disabled. On my account, this option was neither Enabled of Disabled, it was set to Select One.

If you have no intention of ever using the Places feature, you may as well set the Places I check in to Only Me and disable the Include me in "People Here Now" after I check in option.

Scroll back up and look under Things I share:

Thingsishare

Uncheck Include me in "People Here Now" after I check in and then click the the drop-down beside Places I check in and choose Customize and change These People to Only Me.

Save the changes and you're all done.

Privacy? What privacy?

I'm not a web expert, nor am I the paranoid type... but should QuitFacebook.com, who has privacy concerns against Facebook, be tracking its visitors with cookies?

I found these in Firefox's cookies.

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In case you're wondering what they do:

  • __utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
  • __utma tracks each user's amount of visits, first, last visit.
  • __utmb and __utmc are used to track when a visit starts and ends to some decent time resolution (c expires quickly). If you look at cookie state changes (e.g. using firecookie), you will see these change regularly.
  • __utmv is used for user-custom variables in Analytics

http://helpful.knobs-dials.com/index.php/Utma,_utmb,_utmz_cookies

Why would they care where you come from? Or how often you visit their site? Hmmm...?

Fun with Facebook Indexing

The latest Facebook status trend is amusing. People all over Facebook are posting this in their status:
Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. To change this option, go to Settings --> Privacy Settings --> Search --> then UN-CLICK the box that says 'Allow indexing'. Facebook kept this one quiet.
Head on over to The Squid Zone for some good info and handy tips, if you’re the paranoid type.
Now for some fun.
  1. Log into your Facebook account.
  2. At the top-right of your Facebook page, where it says Search, type in allow indexing and hit enter.
  3. On the left, click on Posts by Everyone
  4. Sit back and enjoy the continuous status updates. It’ll refresh on its own.
What makes this more amusing is that all of those status updates are from people you don't know. All people who have their shorts in a knot about keeping their information private or for “friends only”.

Oh the irony.

Come on people. Facebook is a social networking site. If you lock all of you information up, how the hell is anyone you know supposed to find you? If you’re not willing to be a little “social” and do some “networking”, why are you there?

UPDATE: I’m sure this wasn’t there before, but now when you follow those instructions to turn off indexing, you get the following pop-up message:

Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.
There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.
See? You’ve been indexed since 2007. :)