Tutorial: How To Remove Facebook Automatic Location Sharing

[Guest Post]

If you ask me, I think Facebook is itching to invade our private life every time they make changes. Recently, I noticed that all my posts come with the location where I made the post. I really do not care too much about this private information being shared to all my Facebook friends and with my friends’ acquaintances. Until I found out that one of my neighbors was robbed while having their family vacation. Thankfully, the robber who broke into their house was arrested. I further learned that that robber did the crime conveniently when my neighbor was away and the robber exactly knew when and where my neighbor went to vacation. The robber used Facebook to confirm that my neighbor was really out of town by reading my neighbor’s updates.

Now don’t think my neighbor’s story is an isolated case. I also read the same scenarios involving other people as well. Thanks to Facebook, we become very vulnerable and become sitting ducks for malicious elements in our society.

I finally decided to look for ways on how to disable the location sharing in Facebook. And to my surprise, there’s really no way to automatically disable it! How rude of Facebook to sneakily grab our location and give it away to the public without our consent!

Anyway, there’s little that we can do about this since the advantage we get from Facebook is greater than its disadvantages. Thankfully, we can manually (yes, I know it’s really inconvenient) to delete our location information together with our posts. I am sure if you really value your privacy and your SAFETY as well, you’ll not be bothered to follow the easy step I included in this blog. So here is the step-by-step tutorial on how to prevent Facebook from automatically share your location.

1. Step 1: Log in your Facebook Account
   Go to www.facebook.com and log in.
2. Step 2: Look for Update Status
   The Update Status basically gives you the ability to let your friends know what you’re up to.
3. Step 3: Look for the “x” Button
   When you’re about to update your status and Facebook will ask you, ‘What’s on your mind?’ you will find your location below it. Point your cursor on the location but don’t click. You will notice that an ‘x’ button will appear. Click that ‘x’ button.

That’s it! You already made the necessary settings to prevent Facebook to automatically share your location. Just in case you want to restore location sharing, you can simply bring your mouse pointer at the same place where the location appears, then click Add current city.

You see how easy it is to configure and yet Facebook will still forego notifying you or soliciting your confirmation before exposing your private life. And to make things worse, your location is written in light gray color which makes it more difficult to find. How sneaky, isn’t it?

Take note, most mobile phones don’t have the capabilities to let you perform the aforementioned steps. You should really use a desktop computer or laptop to achieve this. If your mobile phone is able to perform this function, then that would be good for you.

So what’s your thought about Facebook’s automatic location sharing? Feel free to comment.