Techiezine

Disable Facebook Places Before it Bites You in the Bum

Facebook’s newest addition to their features is a new places feature that can be used to tag your friends locations, display your own locations, mark events on locations and much more but after seeing the controversy about it and looking more into it we’ve seen it could bite you hard.

I think the best example I’ve seen on this was one where I read about how if someone marked the place of a house party it could well be gatecrashed as everyone on their friends list will see where the location is. Not so good for the person organizing the party.

Other reasons you’ll want to disable it is because your friends can check you into places even if you’re not using it. The here now function also is spread among your friends and if your privacy settings aren’t set correctly it could spread further than just your friends.  Finally the places feature shares the data with other apps on Facebook – do you want all those apps knowing where you reside?

Let’s get down to disabling it then.

To disable Facebook places properly there are two things you need to do.

1. Adjust Your Check-in Visibility and Turn “Here Now” Off

1. Go to your account settings then privacy settings.
2. Select your Place settings (you’ll need to enable it before you can change the settings).
3. Work through the settings turning off any of the features you don’t want.

2. Prevent Your Friends and Apps from Seeing Your Places Info

1. Go to your privacy settings page.
2. Edit the settings for “info available through my friends”.
3. Un-check the Places box.

So now you can make sure Places doesn’t end up being something you wish Facebook hadn’t of added.