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Note: I havent experimented with this yet.

Are we sure this is the ip address of the user and not just the ip address of one of facebook's servers?

If it is a user's address... is that a problem? This seems like very easy to obtain online information... for example, by sending an email to the person im trying to talk with via facebook...

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It's the user (I tested with 2 friends to verify). Here's a scenario we talked about in my house: Once potential problem: friends-of-friends. A friend-of-friend comments on something your mutual friend put out, you then comment, the first friend (whom you don't know) can use this trick to ballpark your location.

Right. But you're all talking to each other. It seems to me this same info would still be available to everyone if you were emailing each other. I don't really see this one as a huge security risk...

Did you test the problem you described? If it works, this is the only potential flaw I see. Including IP addresses with messages still doesn't seem like a bad thing regardless.

It allows some basic location tracking. The real world impact is minimal and easily obtained through other methods. If your friends or family want to track your location it's time to reconsider your relationships with them in my opinion.

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