One of the key concerns which have caused major debates on the subject of Facebook is the matter of privacy. The fact of the matter is that this social media website has completely revolutionised the way we interact with people online. Without a second wasted people share their every thought, feeling, comments, photos, videos and shared links, and considering that 350million people are registered, Facebook is the undisputed king of social networking.

While many people revel at the mere thought of sharing all kinds of details about themselves, there has been the global concern about privacy and how sharing private information could affect us as individuals. The user did have the choice though as to how much information they are willing to share by merely going to the privacy setting and choosing what they want to share with whom. This changed dramatically though in December, 2009, when Facebook’s privacy settings changed in a fundamental way in that Facebook users couldn’t restrict access to their profile the way they used to.  Of course the reaction was one of outcry as this raged the debate of privacy, public information and Facebook even further.

The latest in the “Facebook privacy” saga came about on the 18^th of August, 2010, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced their newest venture – Facebook Places – a Smartphone-based service. This foray into the world of location-based services’ main aim is to bring about 3 things:

• To help users share their exact location for social purposes;
• To help you as a user see who of your friends are nearby; and
• So that you may discover nearby places as well as new places by means of your Facebook friends’ profiles.

In light of the privacy debate focus was placed on Places’ security features wherein it was pointed out that the “check-ins” that users would select when pinpointing their location would be, by default, only visible to their friends. Of course the user will be able to customise the setting should they want to share this information with a broader group or restrict it to only a few selected friends. Moreover, people will only be able to tag those on their friends list in when checking in on Places. To ensure that mischievous behaviour is limited the service will only allow you to check in a friend if the user checks themselves in too, thereby avoiding users to check their friends in at embarrassing places. In case a user was tagged but prefer not to be, they will have the option to remove the tag or opt out from being tagged at all. There will also be a reporting feature on Places where users can report any locations listings that are either offensive, erroneous or outdated.

The day after the announcement Facebook launched the read API which allows people to read check-ins as well as providing them with information about a place. The write- and search API is currently in beta testing phase and said to be soon rolled out by the developers.

The question still remains though whether or not this is sharing too much of one’s private details. Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox shared his enthusiasm about the future and how this device will be able to tell us all kinds of facts about a place and which of our friends are there or have been there before, what pictures they shared when visiting the place and whether or not they had a good time. You need to ask yourself this though – do you really feel the need to share so much of yourself as individual? On the other hand, this could only mean great things for business owners and their online marketing strategy.