The Danger of Being OVER Connected. Facebook Places. Argh!

I was celebrating a killer July sales month so I decided to have a dinner party and I invited some of my younger friends in their 30's. All of them iPad, iPhone, or Droid toting, digitally connected REALTOR colleagues.

We headed over to Blue Corn Cafe off Jefferson and I-25 for blue margaritas.  

The wait staff had arranged a large, long table for all of us. when 90% of our group had arrived I had announced I had checked them in on Facebook Places as they arrived to I could inform the rest of the group.

Foursquare lets you check in and tagging people with GPS like check-in programs like Foursquare and now Facebook Places isn't a bad thing, right?  Well... as I learned today (Sunday) it depends on who you talk to. Because it CAN be a huge violation of your Privacy. 

Here's what happened.

I now have more than 1,000 Friends on Facebook.  Combined with my friends and colleagues I invited to dinner on Friday, we probably shared more than 17,000 friends/contacts. 

As my friends arrived, I checked them into Facebook places without their permission. Informing the rest of the incoming gang where we were and who showed up.

When I informed the group I had added them -- 5 out of the 11 were upset.  One of my friends was completely torked.  He had told his wife a small white lie.  He told his better half that he had work to do.

She is an avid user of Facebook.  (whoops, my bad! ) 

So he imagined his wife waiting at home for him at the front door -- holding the frying pan to beat him over the head immediately upon his arrival.

Another problem didn't surface until the next day.  My post on Facebook Places showed up in more than 100 newsfeed websites.  I never meant to broadcast this to a ton of websites. What the Hell was I thinking?

Ooops. Here I am reading about my dinner party and who I checked in as the arrived at the door. Why does this have to make the news feeds? I had no clue.  Suffice it to say, I got a few upset phone calls this weekend.  Fortunately, the newsfeeds  dump stuff quickly and I personally wrote 11 of them asking them to please clear the news about my party which was now a train wreck that I wanted to forget. 

Who's responsible for this problem? Marrk Zuckerberg, CEO and jerk at large from Facebook. Apparently he just can't seem to stay out of trouble. In April, Facebook announced the LIKE button feature which violated a lot of people's security by openly allowing anyone with the skills to hack your personal calendar online and access content you might not want others to have.

What's WRONG with Check In Networks like Foursquare and new Facebook Places?  Plenty of you've been stalked on line by thieves.

My checking my friends into Facebook Places sends the clear message to a whole new crop of smart theft rings, I call;  DiHeads  (  Digital Housebreakers with Droids  or DHD's  ) 

One of my colleagues told me this is a real problem and he showed me a website, PleaseRobMe showed the darker side of Check in Websites.  I invite you to click and visit that site. If you use Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare -- this will scare the living daylights out of you.  And it needs to wake all of us up -- because we have to be careful with what we do online.

Because thieves will watch you and wait for you to leave your home.  The process might take weeks or months of stalking.  But one day, you go home and you learn sometimes too late, that you need to be more careful with what you post online.

Below is the video on YouTube that shows you how to deactivate the Facebook Places and prevents people from ADDING or letting them Check you in, too.

Tsk. Tsk.  I like Facebook.

But it seems that Facebook never really thinks alot about how their new products will affect personal security.  Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's founder/CEO) blindly spends millions of dollars in new products that can harm you.  

They screwed up in April on the privacy issues.  And now... here we go again.

Below is the YouTube Video that Facebook Places is now under your control.