(From the wsj.com) The launch of Facebook Inc.’s Places location service this week sparked new privacy concerns about the popular social network, but the company’s efforts to mollify critics before the launch stemmed some of the blowback.

Places is a feature that lets users share their physical locations with Facebook friends, but it also allows users to identify friends at those locations. By default, each Facebook member can be tagged at a location by friends until the member changes his or her account’s privacy settings.

The result is that a Facebook member can use a smartphone to ‘check in’ at a nearby location and record that another friend is at that place as well, whether that person is actually at the location or not. That prompted some privacy advocates to advise Facebook users to disable the feature soon after its debut.

Cameron Hiebert, a 36-year-old in Lima, Ohio, said he likes the idea of being able to share his location on Facebook, but not the fact that friends can tag each other, even if they’re not physically at that place with them. As an experiment, he created a fictional place called “Cameron’s Naughty Little House of Perversion and Love,” and tagged five of his friends (as well as himself) as being at that place.

“It is a huge privacy concern,” he said, noting he had already turned off the setting that would allow others to tag him.

Facebook, which changed its privacy controls following a torrent of criticism in May, defended the new feature and said it had consulted a dozen privacy and safety groups before it went live on Wednesday with Places.

Tagging friends in status updates, Facebook said, was a norm on the website even before Places. With location, the company said, it added notification for the person being tagged and the ability to remove individual tags or turn off tagging completely. It also requires that the person doing the tagging place themselves at the location.

Read more here: Facebook Fights Privacy Concerns