Facebook's new stalker tool

Any time Facebook's marketing and dev teams have a bright idea, the result is another privacy invasion.

This time around, it's location services: the ad-farm has decided to suggest strangers as new friends partly based on where you are and where you've been. The Social Network^TM app tracks the location of your smartphone to suggest “People You May Know” as new pals.

So if you and others have the Facebook app installed, and you all hang out at the same places – such as a nearby cafe or your apartment block or a shared office building – Facebook will collect up your whereabouts, put two and two together, and suggest you all become friends through the software.

It's not hard to see how this is more than a little creepy and problematic. It could be abused by obsessives to find out more about the people they're stalking.

"Location is only one of the factors we use to suggest people you may know," a spokesperson told Fusion on Monday.

Since Facebook likes^TM this particular feature too much to let you shut it off, El Reg suggests you turn off location services on your phone any time you want to use the Facebook app. Or just get rid of Facebook. ®