Advertising Age reported last week, McDonald's to Use Facebook's Upcoming Location Feature, which set off new alarms about how Facebook means to use its users:

Facebook is preparing to launch location-based status updates for its users. But the social network is also planning to offer it to marketers, including McDonald's.

As early as this month, the social-networking site will give users the ability to post their location within a status update. McDonald's, through digital agency Tribal DDB, Chicago, is building an app with Facebook would allow users to check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder, say executives close to the deal...

I think I should be well paid for doing that. But sometime after Facebook Places launches, your friend who "checks in" may get a coupon, and you get their ad spam. Such a deal.

Getting ads from my friends would be far more annoying than their Farmville updates. But it's looking inevitable.

Brennon Slattery of PC World writes,

At the Web 2.0 Expo, Google indicated it would be enhancing its Latitude service to give other location-based time-wasters -- like the achingly obnoxious Foursquare -- a run for their money. And now that Facebook has teamed up with McDonald's to launch a similar tracking system, the battle has begun to create the most stalkeriffic app."

You could easily find yourself living a life that's way more public than you bargained for.

You may remember that the early Web shamed much of the marketplace out of making you uncheck the "Sign me up for your email offers!" Opt-in was the only respectable way.

But clothing it all in FB friendship bypasses your spam filters and makes it slip in easy.

I can see where this is heading. Occasional coupons will not ensure frequent marketing placements. Your friends will eventually make actual money in their daily lives by going from retailer to restaurant, checking in and FBing their locations to their newly acquired friendmob. (More friends = higher rates.) You'll be torn, because Friend X is fighting foreclosure, Y has a cat who needs an operation, and Z hasn't left the house since being laid off. These workers will be recruited not by "Work at Home" signs on telephone poles but by their own phones, which will probably pay them, too.

You'll probably check into a list of places in the early days of this Facebook "feature," but since a smartphone knows exactly -- longtitude and latitude -- where it is, geolocation could alert all sorts of businesses to your whereabouts. Expect this ability to be in all phones soon, because it's just too potentially lucrative to precisely target and compete for nearby shoppers. "Hey, I'm just around the corner having a sale on cute shoes and lampshades."... "Hot weiners only 428 feet away!" ... "Over here, big guy..."

Welcome to the Casbah, wherever you are.

If you missed it, here's An easy way to opt out of Facebook's 'sharing' of your personal data. It's a good way to get used to having to say no to the coming blitz and mean it. How to avoid your friends' location spam has to wait till we see how FB implements it. (See What will Facebook's upcoming location-based service look like? for some educated guesses by a CEO with a stake in all this.)

Until you can decide what you are willing to let the market know about you, until you determine who, where and when you are willing to be contacted with what, this is not a relationship: You're a target. But help may be on the way.

Doc Searls -- early blogger, onetime advertising guy and co-author of the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto -- has been formally working on empowering we the customers for a few years now. From About Project VRM:

ProjectVRM is a research and development project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. It has two purposes:

1. To encourage development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations -- especially in commercial marketplaces.
2. To conduct research on VRM-related theories, usage of VRM tools, and effects as adoption of VRM tools takes place.

The project is run by Doc Searls, a fellow at the Berkman Center.

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a term that was coined as a customer-side counterpart for Customer Relationship Management, or CRM -- a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry by which companies manage their relationships with customers, with little or no active input from customers themselves, other than what those companies allow.

By providing customers (and users) with their own tools for managing relationships with vendors, Doc sees VRM as "a way to fulfill one of the promises of The Cluetrain Manifesto" -- the widely-cited website and book written in 1999 by Doc and three other authors (one of which is David Weinberger, also of the Center). That promise was embodied in this statement, written by Christopher Locke:

Doc believes that customer reach will only exceed vendor grasp when customers acquire tools for the job. Encouraging development of those tools has been ProjectVRM's primary work since the project was launched in late 2006...

More at the Project VRM main site, which leads with Doc's project blog, of course.

More:

What will Facebook's upcoming location-based service look like?
Facebook Confirms Its Location Product
Spotted: Facebook's Check-In Functionality And New "Places" Tab