This sound familiar? Facebook users are lashing out at the social networking behemoth for new features that, they grumble, cross the line and trample on their privacy. This time the evil enemy, for some privacy-challenged users, is none other than Facebook Places, the much hyped location-based service just launched to take on Google, Foursquare and others.

New research by WaveMetrix, the online buzz measurement specialists, shows that a surprising majority of users find Facebook Places “stalkerish” and “pointless.” Specifically, the report found that about 70% of the Facebook community is giving negative feedback of the service. Their number one gripe? Yep, privacy. Evidently, despite the major build-up from Facebook, users consider the Places service as an overbearing Big Brotherly burden. Chances are you’ve recently seen a few posts like this on friends’ walls:

Concerned Facebookers have flocked in hordes to an old stand-by, the “Petition: Facebook, respect my privacy!” Facebook group, which has in recent weeks taken to attacking Places. This group, now at 208,000 members since forming in May, far outnumbers the 7,600 “Likes” for the Facebook Places fan page.

Where have we heard this kind of backlash before? Right. Forrester recently reported that only four percent of Americans are willing to give a location-based service a go, the big obstacle, again, being privacy concerns.

Whether or not location-based services go mainstream is now the billion-dollar-question. But let’s not write it off just yet. As we reported yesterday, there may be doubts among some fence-sitters, but many more have taken up the location-based social networking phenomenon in the past year. Stalkerish and pointless? Foursquare’s 3 million users would disagree.