Facebook already has a long track record of privacy fiascoes, so users should really be wary when approaching applications that give FB more information than before. With the recent release of Facebook Places, the company is giving their users the ability to broadcast their location to friends, and vice versa, but as Jenna Wortham from the New York Times writes, this comes with it’s own set of worries:

“Your friends’ apps may be able to access information about your most recent check-in by default as soon as you start using Places,” the organization said. “Even if you’ve already gone through your settings to limit the info that apps can access, you should do it again — you may find that you’ve been defaulted into sharing your location info with apps.”

The early stirrings of concern are reminiscent of the Facebook privacy debacle that erupted a few months ago after the company revised its platform that encouraged members to make personal details accessible more broadly on the Internet. After a string of frustrations, the company simplified its privacy settings in an effort to make the controls easier to navigate.

Early adopters of any social technology must prepare themselves for a little erosion of their own privacy, but products like Facebook Places add entire levels of concern to an already highly public environment. With all social connectivity there is a trade off that we make between protecting our privacy and being closer to our friends—even with cell phones this complaint is common: “It’s nice that my friends/work/family can contact me anywhere I am at, but it would be nice to have some time to myself.”

Welcome to the “Where” dimension

With Facebook Places, this will add an entire new dimension to connectivity that many people may not be prepared to protect themselves from. If Facebook is not defaulting Places to the most private possible settings, then our personal movement information is being broadcast through our unwitting friends to applications we would rather not know where we go every Monday evening after work.

As always, when adopting a new social technology—be it Facebook, MySpace, Twitter—we should gauge all of the benefits against our concerns, and at the same time review how it might impact our lives. First and foremost, users should read and follow security instructions, especially those pertaining to their own privacy. We cannot expect companies like Facebook to make it easy, or to hand us something with maximum security already turned on.

Places will provide an extremely powerful application for tracking our friends; but it will be in our hands to make sure that power doesn’t end up throwing away our privacy for the offered benefit.