Why You Should Never Check-in at Home on Facebook

Why You Should Never Check-in at Home on Facebook

ncreasingly, I am seeing more and more friends check-in on Facebook at their own home. Whether it's a party or just watching a movie, I don't think people understand just quite how public this information can be. Not only that, but it would be quite easy for someone to use this information in a rather worrying way.

Let's say you check-in at home. You might post something like "Watching the Olympics at Home". To do this, you have to first create a new location if the one you want doesn't exist. This means anyoneis able to check in there. You can't create a private location. What's worse, viewing this location on Facebook's Places section shows the location on a map, who's checked in and how many times. Even if you've set your privacy settings on Facebook to not display your address, you've just (semi-unknowingly) made your address public. So how is this bad?

Well, for starters your address is now pretty public. Now this may not be much of a worry for some of you. After all, GPS is accurate to within about 10 metres on a common smartphone, so if you live in a built-up area, no-one is going to know exactly which house you live in. But if you're happy to publicly list your street address and town then it is really going to help someone wanting to know.

Now, let's say you then go to a friend's house or the cinema and check-in (or you're tagged in someone else's check-in), I then know you're not at home in real-time. Since you're not at home, it's likely your house to be empty (especially if you've tagged your partner or spouse).

To see for yourself, log in to Facebook and search for the term "Home". The number of results are staggering.