Facebook Places: too much sharing?

I asked my teen what she thought about Facebook Places and she had two responses:

1. What’s the point?

2. We don’t need an application – we can just update our status or use the chat.

This wasn’t about a creep out factor, by the way. She truly didn’t see the need to fiddle with an application the required a cell phone and a bunch of permissions (see below).  Nor did she feel it was at all necessary given the big picture of her teen life.

I happen to agree.

Facebook is truly about sharing.  They want us all to share with the world our every move – literally! And, now they’ve created an application to do just that.

And, they are about keeping pace with the market. So, it makes sense they would attempt to create an application that offers a feature that other sites have: geolocation. People do seem to like posting their every move even though we may not care if they are at Starbucks, Pizza Hut or Target…we learn about it every day.

So, before you geolocate yourself to the world, ask yourself if you want people to know that much about your life. Do you really want to share that part of your life with your online friends? What message are you telling them about you? And, more importantly, do you want to give out your location? Do you want to tell people you are not home and somewhere else? Does that matter to you?

According to the Washington Post, there are security features in place to protect privacy:

“The default settings for any check-ins are to have them visible only to your Facebook friends–a more restrictive default than most of the site’s standard privacy settings. There are no automatic check-ins, and on an iPhone I had to tap through two permissions dialogs to use Places. Finally, your friends can’t start tagging you as being present until you authorize that activity.”

Sounds good on paper but we all know techno-mistakes can and do occur, especially with groups like Facebook.

Before we all leap into the brazen world of location sharing how about a small dose of caveat emptor and huge dose of digital sharing restraint.

As you can tell, I’m not sold we need to know this much about each other’s lives. If I’m going to meet someone for coffee or dinner, I think I’ll use something more old fashioned – perhaps a text.