by Elton Gahr

Created on: September 17, 2010

In the modern age of computers information is king and the most valuable information that a company can have is information about you. The more knowledge a company has about you the more money it can make, and in the case of Facebook the more open the information is the more money they make. This has led to a real issue where the best interest of Facebook is not necessarily the best interest of their customers especially when it comes to privacy and one of the newest additions to Facebook is Facebook Places and it opens up very real concerns about the amount of information that people are giving away.

In the last weeks stories have been circulating about groups of robbers which used Facebook Places to check to see when people were away from home to help them rob them safer. This turned out to be an exaggeration but not entirely untrue. There really were a couple of cases in which they knew people were out of town because of Facebook.

One of the best websites to check if you are interested in the dangers of over sharing of location based information, and private information in general is the website Please Rob me at pleaserobme.com. This keeps up on the most recent information.

Beyond that fact that a great many people use Facebook there are a couple of reasons why this has been a lightning rod for the issue of privacy concerns. The first of these is that Facebook has already lost our trust when it comes to privacy concerns. More than once Facebook has not only changed its privacy settings but when it did so it defaulted everyone to the least amount of privacy. This means that even if you have told it you want privacy if you do not check your settings regularly you can end up with all of your information public, and with locations that is potentially dangerous.

Finally perhaps the biggest privacy concern is that other people can now check you into places. You can adjust this, but if you do not any of your friends can tell the world where you are at without even asking you. This makes for fun practical jokes, and it does give facebook more information, which is their goal, but it takes away some of the control you would have and makes it even more important that you check the privacy settings on facebook.

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