Facebook, I Really Want to Dislike This!

One of my major frustrations with Facebook, is that there is no way to contact them directly. When I had the annoyance of my house listed as a location, there was only a report box, and no listing of department emails or live chat or even a way to Tweet them. (OTOH, I had a Twitter question, posted an @Twitter on their feed and had an answer in 20 minutes.)

Yeah, so that lack of direct contact is annoying, but most of the time, it's not a big deal.

The latest dislike, the one you may not have noticed is that in the last two weeks, is that every post you make, or picture you place on your wall now has a location on it. Last week, I posted a picture of my new chair, and it took four tries and about twenty minutes on my phone and computer to finally post a picture that didn't have that 'near Tampa' when I was at school or 'near mytown' when I was at home. I hadn't even noticed it until my ex-husband's sister posted on my wall and sent me a message to remove the location. (One of the many reasons I adore Mary-she has my back on that front.)

So, after fiddling around with the new IOS settings on the 4S, which are different from the previous IOS settings, I finally got the location services on the phone, camera and Facebook changed (as opposed to the old IOS, where you only had to shut off one thing). The Mac was a different story.


Ed discovered that when you upload a picture, there was a little 'x' underneath the browse box, located next to the location, and with that, I clicked it and my location disappeared from my pictures. My general posts didn't have locations. Okay, we're good.

Until today.

I posted something this evening about Halloween candy and didn't realize that Facebook reverted back to placing my location on my posts. Then I looked at everything else I posted today and surprise, they all list a location, after I'd specifically deselected it.

In searching Facebook for a fix to the initial discovery, all of their information talked about 'show all your friends where you're posting from' as a positive enhancement to the Facebook 'experience.' What gets me is that, once again, something that affects privacy concerns was rolled out without any announcement or a page to show you how to opt out of this 'great benefit'-the user has to do that on their own.

So, I am adding pictures of what there is and how you can remove them from the Apple IOS 5 phones and on your Mac running Firefox. If you're running a Windows based machine and/or another browser, I can't speak to how you can remove your location from your posts, but I'd hazard a guess that it is somewhat similar process.

Next to your city (on the bottom), hover your mouse and a 'X' will appear. Click it to remove location.

Once you've done this, you'll notice there is no city listed. However, knowing Facebook, you'll need to check this regularly to ensure they haven't changed your settings with one of their 'upgrades'!When you select 'Settings' on the iPhone 4S, this is the screen you will see. Touch the 'Location Services' bar to get to the screen that allows you to change things. (Or you can completely shut off locations, but I like allowing some apps to know where I am)

Now, to fully remove my location from my pictures, I deselected location from both camera and Facebook. I'm not taking any chances...

And Facebook, you need to understand, when you add features that can affect privacy concerns of your users, first announce it, and provide an easy way to opt out of the feature. You know, since your service does not provide a way to directly contact anyone who can fix these issues.

That said: if you have a direct contact resource, please, please, please, write a comment and share it with others! If we had that option, I'm sure there are many of us who would tell them we dislike this feature.