A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger

techscience.org

36 points·karlheinz_py··6 comments

Related- The author says he had his Facebook internship offer revoked for this.

http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/011df79360244011b1ee6bce2...

Even more related, from this article:

> On the afternoon of the 29th, three days after my initial posts, Facebook phoned me to inform me that it was rescinding the offer of a summer internship, citing as a reason that the extension violated the Facebook user agreement by "scraping" the site. The head of global human resources and recruiting followed up with an email message stating that my blog post did not reflect the "high ethical standards" around user privacy expected of interns. According to the email, the privacy issue was not with Facebook Messenger, but rather with my blog post and code describing how Facebook collected and shared users' geo-location data.

So Facebook rightly fears a backlash from implicit location collection because they are offering next to nothing in exchange. Do GoogleMaps, Runkeeper, etc...? No, of course not. Their value proposition is clear.

Conclusions: Users aren't aware and probably don't care enough in mass to deny implicit location collection. The subtext is there's only a potential backlash if you don't provide sufficient value; Facebook can't seem to figure out how to provide that value so they removed it.

We dont actually believe they removed it, do we?

This is silly, there was an obvious blue highlighted GPS icon beside every message you sent with geolocation attached.

Many people find the default behavior useful and it's easy to turn off.

the problem is that Facebook didn't ask explicitly if the user wants to activate that feature. Not everybody is sufficiently tech savvy to know what that icon means

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