Facebook has just announced Places, the long-awaited feature that brings location-based functionality to the most popular social network in the world. This feature lets you share your current location by “checking in” from your smartphone. Places isn’t available everywhere yet.
Users who wish to announce their location to their friends on Facebook would tap a “check in” button to see a list of places nearby, and then choose the place that matches where they are.

After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends’ News Feeds [on Facebook] and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place. The feature will be useful not only to let friends know where they are, but also to learn if their friends are nearby at the same time, and to write down what they are doing at the location.
When users check into a place, they also can “tag” any Facebook friends who are with them, essentially letting other friends know that the person is there, too. To cut down on the potential for users to falsely tag friends to a place, people can tag friends only if the taggers themselves check in to the location, too.

Worried about Privacy??
Are you worried about your privacy? Do not want the world know your exact location in this world? You can turn it off anytime you want. But before that let me inform you- Every person on Facebook must agree before they check in or can be checked in to a place. Before you have agreed and someone tries to tag you, you are not associated with any location. In addition, the story your friend tagged you in does not show up on your profile until you have agreed to allow it. Also, the message that lets you know a friend would like to check you in includes a link to Learn More, which explains how to stop getting these messages. Finally, there are many protections built into the system–only confirmed friends can try to check you in, to tag you a friend must also check themselves in, you are notified every time someone tries to check you in, you can easily remove any tag, and you can turn off tagging altogether.
To turn it off:
1. Go to privacy settings
2. Go to “customize”
3. Scroll to “things others share”
4. Disable “friends can check me into places.”
To change who can see your checkings, go to your account’s privacy settings. You’ll see that “Places I check in” is by default shared with “Friends Only.” You can change who views your checking from this area.

Facebook said it would make Places available in other countries and on more mobile platforms soon.

I hope the post helped you to learn about Facebook Places. Feel free to share your place with your trusted friends.

Sources:

http://www.pcworld.com/

http://www.technewsdaily.com/

http://mashable.com/

http://articles.cnn.com/

http://consumerist.com/