Facebook Rats You Out

Yeah, Facebook Places, I'm talking about you. Some people seem to think it's a great idea. Personally, I think it's ruined by Facebook's usual sleazy implementation. They automatically set everybody up to be telegraphing their location, and worse yet, if your friends tag you someplace, that location will get broadcast too even if you have opted out of Places for yourself. You have to visit two widely separated spots in their settings to put the kibosh on this.

Of course, I understand why Facebook did things this way: if they have zillions of people signed up it's an attractive audience for selling to advertisers and marketers. So Facebook signed everybody up without their consent, and made it difficult to figure out what you're signed up for and how to turn it off. You know, if Facebook had never done things this way before I might cut them some slack. But this is how they've done things time and again; they usually take the method that promises to bring in the most revenue at the expense of their customers.

No wonder Google is trying to go after Facebook. They sense a market opportunity here. I hope Google does something that takes better care of privacy by default.