Facebook to Add Location Sharing
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Facebook will join the likes of FourSquare and Gowalla and add location sharing to its functionality late next month.
The service will allow Facebook users to share their location with friends as well as allow outside developers to offer their own location-based services. But according to sources, this isn’t an attempt to crush the smaller social networks like FourSquare.
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Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.
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In 2009, Google started Google Latitude with the pitch to let users “See where your friends are right now.”
With over 100 million Facebook users updating their statuses from mobile devices, geolocation is becoming more and more popular. But as location sharing increases, so do the privacy implications. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-DeVries’ piece yesterday addressed these very concerns.
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Facebook is set to add location-sharing to its popular site next month. Meanwhile, services such as Foursquare and Loopt have been adding users, and a plethora of smaller tools have sprung up as well. But a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University showed that the majority of the more than 80 location services it surveyed either don’t have privacy policy or collect and save all data for an indefinite amount of time.
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The Carnegie Mellon study found that people value the ability to find others in an emergency and get information based on their location. Lorrie Cranor, an associate professor of computer science and one of the authors of the study, said people also value location-based advertising in some circumstances — a good thing for the companies that are building a business around precisely that. But she said many people just don’t realize what a database of all the locations they’ve been at over time could mean.
Share your thoughts. Are you concerned about the privacy implications of location sharing?
The location-sharing tools are inaccurate. At worst they are based on cell tower signals; at best, on primitive GPS triangulation. I was tweeting last week while in the Berkeley/Piedmont area using an application that posted my “location”. The closest the published location came to my actual location was 10 miles and at worst, 30 miles. So is anyone going to be able to find me at the cafe sipping my latte? Not unless I tell them exactly where I am.
Jesus Christ, consultants feuding it out? This is painful. Worse on Mo, but matches the Mculiffe campaign pretty well.
The Man are out hunting for that just right web site , and the Women are just fine camping out with just one web site that cares about them being there, Women also feel safer on facebook then on other web site