The one thing scary about a smart phone with access to social networking and GPS is that potentially, someone out there can know where you are.
Sure, some networking sites such as Foursquare allows users to voluntarily check in and would not keep track of their travels unless the use explicitly commands the app to do so. But Mark Zuckerberg does not care about such things. The young billionaire has already expressed that privacy of users is an issue that he does not concern himself with (which is actually fitting, the man did re-invent social networking which is basically all about placing your profile out for the public to see).
And thus the crux of today’s focus subject: Facebook’s location script. There is already a provision for the location function with the use of a ghost tab in the mobile version of the website. The question now is will the function be automatically checking your actual location?
The concept is scary as this actually conveys real time data across the web and it is not the best way to live if your neighborhood happens to have its own share of stalkers. Facebook itself is not too keen on providing users with a sense of security which makes them the most unreliable people to turn to in terms of this. At most, users can hope for an opt-out option in order to avoid having trouble by getting their locations exposed.
Facebook has already announced that it is planning a new wave of ads for use and they are already making use of all the data that is being gathered by the expansion of the “likes” button into various web pages. It would not be so surprising to know that they are cut throat enough to track user’s preferred commercial establishments and use that data in order to create better customer profiles for targeted ads.
Tags: Facebook, online-privacy, Social-networking, stalkers