Wondering where that most recent Super Swarm badge was unlocked (for the record, it was Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks)? Want to know how someone unlocked the “I’m on a Boat” badge when they live in the middle of Arizona? You’d better hope you’re friends with them on foursquare, otherwise you’ll never know. On Friday, Foursquare made a change in the interest of privacy and now only your friends can see where you unlocked a badge.

Last week foursquare took some flack — undeserved flack, in my opinion — because a “white hat” hacker was able to figure out most checkins in the San Francisco area by repeatedly scraping the “who’s been here” section of venue pages. Foursquare implemented some changes after the issue was brought to their attention, but did not alert users until Wired’s Threat Level blog accused them of being more interested in securing funding than securing users’ privacy.

Since then foursquare has clearly taken a hard look at privacy — which is certainly a good thing — and implemented some changes. In addition to randomizing the “who’s been here” list to cut off the method used in the “white hat” attack and expanding a privacy option to remove users from the list entirely, they’ve made both mayorships and badge unlock locations visible only to your friends. This last change takes a little of the fun out of foursquare for many people. I enjoy seeing where other users have unlocked badges and often add those venues to my to-do list of places to visit. It’s also quite interesting to see where people unlocked the swarm and super swarm badges. Without seeing the venues on the badge screen, it’s almost impossible to tell where those events took place.

In contrast to Facebook — which offers very granular privacy controls — foursquare is making privacy changes that affect all users, whether they like it or not. Why could this bit of information not be rolled into the privacy control foursquare modified to remove users from the “who’s been here” list? Or, even better, why couldn’t a new privacy control have been added just for this? Badges are unlocked rarely enough, that I, for one, like to share where I earned them with everyone on foursquare.

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