Attach Privacy Level to Location

I'd like this, I pretty much never would want my home location to ever show up on public britekite

Martin - I suppose that would do, as long as it automates the process of going private before any notifications are sent out. I still like the idea of having both, to save the trouble of having to switch to private/public with each checkin.
Sounds good

Any news on this feature coming to fruition?

I dont like the idea of separate privacy level settings. I think Martins idea is the best in terms of adding an "always private flag"

Well the problem with having an always private flag is when you're on the go. I think it'd be preferable to let the user choose what the default setting is.

For example, I don't mind letting locations be public when I'm anywhere but home, but if the default is set to private then I need to change that per each check-in. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding it here.

Agree with the original poster and John. Today I've really only been to three locations, and one of them was home, and I feel like when I'm "checking in" to my home location, I don't want the address blasted to everyone... unless I'm having a party or something.

I really like the "always private" flag idea; this seems like the ideal solution to me.

In addition to "always private", an "always public" flag might be useful. Tagging things like conference centers or coffee shops to be public where otherwise operating in a default-private mode.

Something else I've thought of.. everyone has a home (or so I hope they do) and most people don't want to release the exact location of their home, but don't mind letting people know if they're at the local starbucks or hanging out a local pub.

Why not have the ability to set your "Home Location" and have a public/private setting for it. Then your global public/private setting will be applied to everything else.

Er... I'm confused how this is different from my original post... (is it?)

I think it's the same, I just brought up the public flag side of it again/expressed a second vote since Martin's initial post only mentioned the private side.

Ah ok. Yeah, I'd really like to have both. Being able to change your privacy level just by checking in would be a boon.

+1 for some placemarks being in "always private" mode.

I like this idea, but also the inverse (having some "Placemarks" always public, like businesses or event venues).

I came over to Feedback to post this very thing. I'm glad to hear this is already being looked at.

Privacy settings at each placemark allow me to broadcast "Home" to the world without revealing the actual location to anyone but say, my trusted friends. I've already gone back and forth in my privacy settings many times trying to decide just what I think "Private" should mean in this instance, and it really comes down to particular locations.

Full-on private for everything should still be an option that I can send a command to "hide out" from everyone other than trusted friends, but Privacy is really relative. I expect privacy at home unless I'm sharing it with people I trust, but I don't necessarily expect privacy by default when I'm at a coffee shop, for example.

I'm pleased to see this is already being discussed. I was about to add it myself. For me, location is highly correlated with whether I want to be public or private. Diner? Public. My mistress' house? Private. (Or did I get that backwards?)

My idea for this might be a tad more work to implement, but would likely be easier to use. Users would still have a global public/private setting, which they could set at will. Placemarks would have three settings: always public, always private, or honor the global public/private setting. The default for a new placemark would be to honor the global setting.

Make sense?

Any news on this front?

I'm just adding my two cents. I would like to be able to choose per placemark the degree of accuracy. For example, for a public place, like a cafe, I would like to say that the actual location is available to friends, but not the general public. My home or the home of friends and family would be visible only to trusted friends. If I'm in a place where I want to share what's going on with the world, like a festival at a park, I would set that to visible to everyone.

Can we get an update on the status of this feature, however it may be implemented?

I think this is a great feature, one thing i'd like to see for privacy is the ability to have @placemark instead of @city or @exact

I think this is what you're going for but i'm not 100% sure

I have a slightly different variation of this. While I don't mind anyone knowing my home address (since I live in a large building that shares the same street address with retail and restaurants), I'd prefer not to have it pushed to Twitter every time I religiously check back in for the night. It's more of a redundancy thing that anything else. I like to let people know when I'm out somewhere, but it's boring and almost depressing generated a tweet that I'm home. I'd feel the same way if a "Home" placemark showed up instead. The same would be true if I went to an office every day; I don't think it would be newsworthy that I'm at work. So while I like the option to have public/private placemarks, I'd also love to choose whether to feed Twitter (and other services that may be offered in the future) based on each placemark.

Some great ideas here. I've been noodling on this problem for quite some time, and want to suggest one more variation on the theme of the always-private flag:

You've essentially already got four tiers of privacy controls (public mode, trusted friends, friends, anybody). These are your verticals. You include the always-private flag concept as a third horizontal per vertical. Give me the option to exclude locations from visibility to certain groups.

In my case, I want all friends to know my exact location, with the exception of if I'm home, at my parents' house, or a handful of other sensitive spots. What I need is the ability to create an exceptions list (with always show / never show options) for "public mode", "trusted friends", "friends", and "everyone."

Thoughts?

For the time being, couldn't something as simple as appending your sms check-in with private to mark the location private?

Any progress on this? It'd be great to see a feature that was requested three months ago get some attention.

That's great ... but it isn't working for my place. I can enter a full UK address with house number and postcode, and I can't see the link. For some reason, it won't "remember" the road number ... so it won't display the privacy link.

If you're adding a place at road level, the privacy option should really be displayed. If someone is trying to find you, its not hard to track you down if you know the road someone is in; just look for your car, or sit there at commute time and watch you leave or enter the house. If I have to list my home with a visible street name this isn't a very complete privacy solution.

Functionally speaking it doesn't APPEAR to be working. It might be, but regardless of refreshes the button still says public when switching from an always public location to an always private location. This is from web, haven't tried it from cellphone yet. So close.

I've noticed that when checking into a location that's marked "Always Private," like my home address, Bkite appears to send the exact location to Fire Eagle, not the inexact one that it's providing to other Bkite users. FE then displays information about my exact location, and provides it to other apps that poll FE. When I twittered about this last night:

@brightkite If I have a place set to always be private, what info does it provide to Fire Eagle? Looks like it's sending the full location.

Bkite's response was:

@thomwatson FE does not have the granularity of privacy controls available in Bkite. We share the publicly available location with FE.

Wouldn't the "publicly available location" for a location marked as always private be the inexact version? This seems to be what they say they're sending in response to my inquiry. However, my personal experience suggests the opposite, that they are sending -- at least as recently as last night -- my exact location even for a private location.

This is back to there simply not being enough options. And maybe its an issue of options on Fire Eagle's end, but the two options it gives when syncing with Fire Eagle are exact location or zipcode (there are more options, but less specific). On the one hand, for Fire Eagle to be useful, they need my exact location, but on the other hand, since I have told BrightKite not to give that information out, they shouldn't give it out. It should look as if I checked in at a zip code or city, not an address. It doesn't seem like that should be to hard.

Lesley, I'm glad at least that you're going to make what you do clearer, but it actually means that Brightkite and FE together just isn't useful for me. If I need to go into FE and change my privacy setting there each time I check into an always-private location in Brightkite, when otherwise I want my location in FE to be public, then why should I even use Brightkite? The alternative is that I set FE to show everything at an imprecise level, which also is less than desirable.

Although I can see how this new system works for many, it still doesn't work for me or anyone dealing with a mixed-use development with one street address. In my case I live in a large building with retail and restaurants on the ground level. I'd like to be able to check in publicly to a restaurant or gallery but not my actual residence. If we had actual private placemarks, this would work fine. Unfortunately, the setting of one (my residence) overrides another (a store) because we share the same address. I really hope this will be resolved in the future. This would seem a potential hassle for many folks. Thanks for taking the concept this far.

I would still really, really love to be able to toggle the Twitter feed easily *without* having to go into private mode. I don't actually care whether anyone knows where I live; I just don't want it pushed to Twitter every time I return home and dutifully check in. I also may go somewhere like a grocery store where I'd like to check in publicly but don't think the Twitterverse would care. In a perfect BK world, activity at certain placemarks could also be designated as being fed (or not) to Twitter (and perhaps future services), independent of privacy settings.

You did a limited version of it but not with the option to assign public and private status to different placemarks at the same address. This still doesn't seem to work for mixed use developments which can be several blocks in size yet all share the same address.

You implemented this, but with some locations, it cannot be reversed with some placemarks (the link which provides the option is not available).