Recently active topics in Brightkite tagged with privacy

Browsing through some of the privacy ideas here, it seems like a great number of them could be solved simply by attaching a privacy level to individual locations. For instance, when signaling BrightKite that I'm at home, I would have Private mode attached to Home, so before it would notify anything at all to anyone it would set me to private than send the check it that I'm at home (but private). Likewise I could attach public to the Cafe, so when I get to the Cafe from home and checkin at the Cafe it would set everything to public and announce that I'm at the cafe.
This would even solve some of the issues with SMS checkins. I would no longer have to set Public or Private before checking in at a location, I would simply /know/ that as soon as I checked in where I was the appropriate level of privacy would be applied.

ShaBot

It'd be nice if I could switch into private mode from within the "privacy" tab on my account settings page

Forgive me if I'm just missing this feature, but it does me absolutely no good to know that my friends checked into my city. Perhaps they aren't close enough friends to want to give me their exact location (especially until you guys get the "always private" tag worked out), but they would be comfortable giving out slightly more information than just the city.

For example, divide the city into blocks or some other smaller division. That way, for those people who don't want me to necessarily know their *exact* location, I can at least know that we're on the same block/street/neighborhood/within x distance/etc.

Is this already available and I'm just missing it?

Thank you!

Could the name of our placemarks be what is passed to twitter? I don't want the universe knowing my location, but my friends know where my home is and if they want to find locations that I check into they can investigate/ask me.

It would be nice if we could toggle if a checkin is public or private, OR have the ability to mark a location as "Always Private".

My biggest gripe with brightkite is having to delete checkins because I forgot to toggle my private status before I checkin at my house, and/or, forgetting to toggle when I leave my house and marking places private that can be public.

It would be nice if you could have privacy settings on individual placemarks so that, for instance, my home address is hidden, but places i visit aren't

Hey, thought it would be cool to share Placemark names (like "home" or "work") instead of revealing the exact address, as a privacy feature. Right now displaying address doesn't really give an idea of what the location is.

Here's a proposed UI improvement for checking in and going private:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryj...

Right now it's extremely problematic that this is a separate/two-stage process. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. when I check in somewhere, Brightkite broadcasts that immediately to my friends. If I want that location to be private, and click the slider, it would have been too late -- my location would already be revealed (yes, this has happened to me).
2. If I need to click the privacy toggle FIRST and THEN checkin, I'm confused, because I might not want the previous place where I was to be made private! Confusing!

The issue is that you've confused state with location, or separated them in an unnatural/uncomfortable way. Really when you change locations, you also want to change your privacy option -- or have the option to do so. When you save a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, you have the option to make the bookmark private, AS YOU ARE SAVING IT, not after you broadcast it to everyone!

Anyway, check out my proposed UI. It needs work, but should start the conversation.

I think it would be nice if I could set certain locations to private, but have the rest of my posts be public.

So like say if I checkin at home, it automatically defaults to private so stalkers don't know where I live, but if I go somewhere else, it'll update to public.

Please consider the ability to enable comments to the public (non-registered users)

I think it would be useful to include a privacy setting selector (drop down box or radio button) on the following pages of the mobile site: check-in and note posting. Editing the privacy setting before a post is somewhat of a hassle as is. It requires browsing to the "Edit privacy" link, then changing your settings, then submitting them. This is a slow process on my frustratingly slow mobile web. It would be much easier to simply submit your preferred privacy setting along with the note or check in. As is, the place search/check in process already takes quite a few clicks and page loads. Anything to alleviate this would be helpful.

Thanks,
Alex

I have two ideas for you're already awesome service:) 1. It would be great to have a "check-out" option. When I leave a place, I may not get to the next location for a while, and I'd like folks to know that I'm not at the last location anymore. 2. I would like to have an additional level of privacy for my home address. Basically, if I could just have home address be set to always private, but still say "home" that would be awesome.