How to stop Facebook friends from tracking you

Do you know where your friends are? Facebook might be able to tell you -- whether they want you to know or not.

Facebook has debuted a new location service called Places that allows you to add your location to posts. It also allows others to tag you at a particular location, and it can even tell you who is near you at any moment. And as Facebook usually does with new features intended to rob you of any remaining illusions of privacy, it's all enabled by default.

It's all well and good, until you happen to be somewhere that you prefer not to broadcast to the world. If nobody sees you, fine. If a friend recognizes you and tags your location, then good luck denying it later. (You can delete tags, but if you don't happen to see the notification for a few hours or days, the word will be out.)

Just what kind of scenario might lead to you not wanting your location known, we leave up to you. Perhaps you want everybody to know when you're sipping cocktails at a posh bar in Northwest D.C., or that you just bought some worms at an Annapolis bait shop. But if you prefer not to have all of your Facebook friends aware of your movements, you need to change some privacy settings.

The good folks over at Gawker have a step-by-step guide, with pictures, to make it easy to do. Click here for the lowdown.