Why does anyone purposely allow facebook or google to know where they are?

Home insurance companies will love this :-/ Lol…........

Stupidity?

I have no idea why this is a popular feature. I don’t want my location tracked, don’t want people checking me in to places,or tagging me in photos. I turn off all of these options. They suck.

@Blueroses I turned off those options too. I don’t want people to know where I am unless I tell them myself. I think I can still be tagged in photos, but that’s it.

Another reason I choose my Internet sites and Net friends wisely.

You can say no to that feature and I always do. I guess some folk like their friends to know where they are but I find it creepy.

Because some people are more social than others. So that when you’re at some place you can “check in” and meet other people who like to frequent the same places you do, so that you can find people near you who like to do the same things. The internet is a cool place to meet like-minded individuals for pretty much everyone, but if they’re 2,000 miles away and you can’t hang out except for in a chat room, well… that can only be so much fun.

@Allie I like to be social. I also prefer to have my possessions left inside my home.

I knew someone would take it personally….

There’s a difference between checking in to a public place and posting your home location (or any number of sites). You can do one without doing the other. The question says nothing about posting your home location, it does mention that people will know you’re not at home. True, the whole point of checking in is to tell people you’re out and maybe who you’re with. I wouldn’t post my home location on a site either, but I don’t have a problem checking in to places.

An inability to keep a secret.
Or a chronic lack of attention.

cnet had a blog a few weeks ago where it stated google and facebook want people NOT to be anonymous to avoid bullying and such .. if you can’t stay “hidden” or have any privacy it’s less likely to act like a jerk .. guess what? Some agree to it while others still like their privacy to be privacy.

I wasn’t aware that we have a choice. When I first started on the internet I knew nothing about privacy, and on most of my initial entries I used my real name and contact information. That will never disappear.

Such features are a stalker’s paradise. There was a feature article over here a year or so ago about the option to let (I think) Facebook say where you are. A journalist picked a random person, and tracked them for a day. At the end of the day, they were both in the same club and the journalist contacted the young woman and told her where she had been all day. She was completely oblivious to possible negative outcomes of transmitting such information. I think some people are just naive.

Social networking sites? No. But Google? Yes. I can’t use Google’s navigation features on my phone if I don’t let Google know where I am by turning on the phone’s GPS (and part of the reason to splurge on an Android smartphone is so I don’t have to also buy a GPS).

It’s a lot harder to stalk a random person than you might think. You have to already know where they live, and normally if you do, it implies some kind of trust. You can set things to only notify certain people that you just checked into where ever, perhaps only the 5 friends you trust to not rob you. And really, if you’re so concerned about these friends robbing you, you shouldn’t be inviting them over to your home when you’re there; it only takes a couple seconds of your back turned to them (preparing drinks, going to the restroom, grabbing them that book to borrow) for them to steal small valuables or place a keylogger on your computer.

I’m confused about this too. How would someone find out through goggles+ if I’m in my gmail from work, home or wireless on the road? Do you mean it broadcasts on my profile that I’m at a specific locale such as the grocery store parking lot?

What I was concerned about with google plus, was it would have my cell phone and my gmail, and when I have gps activated on my phone, which I only turn on when I am using the nav, then maybe google would pull the info and show it to my network on google plus if I signed up. That it might happen without me doing anything to make it happen, or nothing that I knew I had done. It seemed to interconnected, it made me nervous.

If any of you who are my facebook friends ever see my location pop up please let me know, I never would do it purposely. I only talk about vacations and events after the fact, when I am already back home. Or, in private groups where supposedly only the people in that group can see any updates.

As I said above, it’s easy to opt out of “Show my location.”

@janbb You are talking about google plus? I was not sure if you were talking about facebook or google or both.

@JLeslie I’m under the impression that it finds your location to add it to your posts, pictures you take and upload from your phone, places you’re tagged, etc. These are all things you can turn off. Facebook has a new feature that adds your location to posts you make from your computer too. It’s based on your “current city” from your profile I’m guessing, but I’ve clicked it off on one post and it’s never showed up again. (I don’t see why this is a problem if it says your current city on your profile anyway though.)

One reason got Google+ to want your location is to know who is nearby. That isn’t really an issue for those who only access Google_ from their home computer, but those of us with smartphones are a different matter.

Check your privacy settings to see who other than Google can see your whereabouts. If you have them set right, then the tracking isn’t really an issue since the only people who know are Google and those who have other means to track you anyways, often law enforcement of some form or another.

As for why people are not paranoid about advertising the fact that they are not home, think about it for a moment. I don’t know about you, but I have a job, so it’s a pretty good bet that I won’t be home during the day five days a week, and that was considered “common sense” long before the Internet hit the mainstream. As for random people, odds are that anybody who wants to break into my house probably isn’t tracking my phone and/or is close enough to my place to see whether I am home or not anyways.

@JLeslie google + – that’s what you were asking about.

People are forgetting the value of privacy. It worries me, because it’s not the sort of thing we can grab back once we give it away.

@jerv Some of your reasoning there is logical. Still, it makes me nervous,