Right so those of you with a Bebo account may not have noticed this yet but its Bebo latest add-on

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As you can see from the comments people are not happy, when I first saw it, I was like hmm Interesting implementation of google maps, so I showed herself and she flipped the lid. Thought about for like two minutes and was like yea!

What a major invasion of privacy, it shows our location literally 100 yards from our real address (we live close to the exchange)

For those those with out a Bebo account what you can see is the location of the ISP of everyone looking at your Bebo in a Google map. As someone pointed out on the Bebo blog all it takes is one paeddo to go a kids page leave a comment then sit watch their map for the kid to come and look at his page to see where the kid lives!

The maps looks like this and zoom right in to street level!

Attached Images

	bebomap.JPG (57.8 KB, 31 views)
	bebomapzoom2.jpg (92.6 KB, 26 views)

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So they're basically reusing the info from your personal profile?

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No it seams to based on the ip's of the people viewing your profile, I know under normal circumstances a web master would have this information based of whatever Stat's program they were using (ie awstats, analytics) but when combine this with wealth information contained in people Bebo profiles ...

Allot people would use Bebo to check other peoples Bebo's pages to see what thay are upto (that is what its built for after all) and now an educated guess can tell you who has being viewing your profile. The problem is when you view peoples profiles that you don't want them to know about.

the info cannot be used to identify YOU so I don't see the problem.

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Without looking at it it sounds like it just shows the locations of people viewing your profile by ip, but doesn't tie the locations in with user profiles etc. If that's the case it's not that major but I could see it scaring a lot of people.

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Since it takes your IP address (and most likely just locates the ISP) it can't really identify anyones location in any exact manner, best you'll get is the nearest big town. I know where 90% of the people who look at my profile live and yet the map shows results from places in the back arse of nowhere but in the right county. As it is Myspace has the ability to add similar tracking tools, as do quite a few other social networking sites. The age of being anonymous on the net is totally gone, just look at google analytics, the amount of things you can tell about your visitors is almost scary.

Yeah, as long as the tracking comes from your IP-address and not any address you supplied in your profile I don't see much problem with this. Your IP address is there for anyone to see anyway...

Looks like bebo have responded to the concerns, they've changed the system a bit and now give this information:

"We take the privacy and safety of our users very seriously:

• Visitor Map is Off (no visit information shared) by default.
• You can completely opt out of sharing your visits by setting your Visitor Map setting to Off
• Locations are not accurate. They serve only to indicate the region of the visit.
• Visitor Map information is only shared with other Beboers also sharing their information.
• Beboers under 18 cannot share their profile information."

They also confirm how they get the information:
"The Visitor Map shows where other Beboers have visited you from. The location is an estimate based on your IP address."

So since its turned off by default, only available to over 18's, and inaccurate in their locations (they've even stopped being able to zoom right into the sreet), its not at all dangerous or invasive. Case closed.

yea they did all that about week after the launch of it, and it really seams to have eased peoples worries (well herself seams ok now anyway) so I doubt we hear much from it again.

This is the way it should have lauched IMO. To non techie people the original way was quite disturbing to see, particualy those living close to their exchange. People don't realise that this kind of information is available and making it easely accesible wasn't such a good plan. We all know you can get this info if have a site and access to the severlogs and a geoIP tool but people who have bebo pages generaly don't have this.