I think it's a great feature. There have definitely been some apps where I would have liked to use them but they've had permissions requirements that I did not believe the app's core functionality needed.
Seriously, if you use any of facebooks stuff, you clearly value something they offer more than your privacy. Everybody, and I'm not just talking about the HN crowd, knows how bad Facebook is when it comes to privacy.
This is the sort of sad comment that continually amazes me. Facebook is am important part of the social life of millions (billions?) of people. It isn't feasible to go away from it. It's completely reasonable to have a requirement to use Facebook while not wanting it to be an ass about stuff like constant GPS fixes.
Yeah, sure, don't use Facebook. You're the guy who butts into conversations to tell everyone how you don't own a TV, aren't'cha?
Sorry to disappoint you, but the rest of America has basically abandoned email and Twitter isn't a serious medium for connections (at least, among non-technical people I know; I have a number of friends who use Twitter on the regular, but only a small few use it meaningfully). If you have friends--especially non-technical ones--who aren't in your local area (or, a lot of the time, aren't in your workplace) Facebook is very frequently the only way to keep in regular touch with most of them.
Network effects matter. That's not sad, that's simply reality. The lock-in effect is real and puts you in a position where, yes, you have to use it unless you wish to move out of contact with people. That doesn't mean you have to like it and it doesn't mean you can't, as the person you sneered at did, express a desire for its improvement.
That's the typical response. Except that reality doesn't concur. People who stop using Facebook end up excluded from social circles. Not through malice, but because it's harder to be in contact with that one offhand person who Doesn't Even Own A TV--er, sorry, Doesn't Use Facebook. They're sand in the social gears.
(The self-centered prick's response of "then they're not real friends"--which I am addressing because it frequently comes next--willfully ignores that said self-centered prick is making it harder on everyone else to include them. They get excluded because they're being annoying. You have to give to get, and part of your giving is not making everyone else's life difficult because you're frothy about a web company.)
In the U.S. at least, if you have a basic appreciation of people you have formed friendships with over the years, if you value interacting with them over that self-centered Facebook froth, it's not feasible to ditch it. But you can still express a desire for it to improve.
I tend to keep GPS switched off in the phone settings because of this sort of thing.
FB is not allowed on my device in the first place because I don't trust it, but it's not the only offender. It really annoys me when I'm in-app or in-browser and I see the GPS icon pop up and start trying to get a lock. Sometimes even before the browser has asked if a page is allowed to have the location.
For me, it's things like Facebook, Dropbox, Google search, Twitter, Skype, and a plethora of others that one would expect to seamlessly allow for permissions adjustments.
