ACLU Raises Privacy Questions About Facebook's 'Places'

The Places function pits the technology that allows mobile device users to easily connect with each other regardless of location against concerns that those users may not understand the privacy implications of such openness.

Facebook is being made available this week to all U.S. users, and should be available to all users in the next few days, Facebook said Thursday in a blog post by Michael Sharon, Facebook product manager for Places.

With Places, users can "check in" using their mobile phone and choose from a list of locations near where they are. They can also key in the location. At that point, they can write a story about their activity, which will then be sent to friends via the Facebook News Feeds.

Users can also see who is checked in at that location, and can prevent others from seeing them as checked in at a location by unchecking the "Include me in 'People Here Now' after I check in" privacy control, Facebook said.

For the American Civil Liberties Union, however, the release of Places is raising some privacy red flags.

While Facebook has limited the default visibility of a user's feed to "Friends Only," it has failed to build in other important safeguards, the ACLU wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

Facebook makes it easy for a user's friends to say "yes" to get that user's check-in information, but are given a "not now" option instead of a straight-forward "no," the ACLU wrote.

Someone using Places is also told that his or her friends can check-in for that user, but must do a lot of digging into privacy controls to change the default, the ACLU wrote.

Users will also find it difficult to control who knows their location. The ACLU wrote that users can turn the "Here Now" function on or off, but cannot control who sees them in a location.

And, while Facebook wrote in its blog that only the user's friends can see when he or she visits or is tagged at a place unless the master privacy control is set to "Everyone," the ACLU wrote that the "Here Now" function is turned on by default for users that previously allowed the choice of "Everyone" to see any part of their information.