That was one of several points stressed by Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch, who sat down with Mobilized ahead of his appearance at a Churchill Club event Wednesday night focused on location-based services.

Among the company’s recommendations is that consumers think twice before taking actions such as broadcasting their location when they are alone or sharing geo-tagged photos of their home or children.

Microsoft did some research in December that found that three in five consumers are aware of location-based services and roughly half say they have used such a service, with one in 10 of those surveyed saying they use such services on a daily basis.

While the most common reported usages were for things like navigation, traffic and weather, about 18 percent of respondents said they were using a service like Foursquare, Facebook or Google Latitude that broadcasts their location.

The software maker is releasing the results later on Wednesday ahead of Friday’s commemoration of Data Privacy Day. This year, the company decided to focus its efforts on location-based services.

“This is a high-stakes, high-value data element,” Lynch said.

Lynch also noted that people sharing location with their social network might want to review just how wide that network is.

“I actually believe [sharing of] location data is a situation which probably should cause people to really go review that list,” he said.

And while there is a responsibility on consumers to be more aware, Lynch said, those building services and products also need to do their part.

“You can build it into the experience to actually make people aware that this is going to happen and they have a role to play in the choice,” he said.

Microsoft’s research found that privacy concerns are a barrier for some to adopting location-based services, particularly in the U.S. About half of overall survey respondents said they would be more comfortable with such services if they had more information on just who was seeing the information being shared.

The company also found that while 94 percent of consumers find location-based services to be valuable, they weren’t terribly willing to pay, and those who were often weren’t willing to pay more than $10 for such services. That seems to indicate more promise for advertising-funded services, especially since nearly half of those who have seen a location-based mobile ad have taken action on the ad–vastly higher than the response rates seen on traditional online ads.

It might also be a business. That’s the hope of investors who have just plowed $1.6 million into the six-man operation, which launched a few months ago.

First Round Capital and Lower Case Capital are putting new money into the company, along with existing investors Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners, who previously invested $300,000. Stickybits is also touting the arrival of semi-celebrity angel investor Chris Sacca.

Again, explaining Stickybits takes a bit of work, and it may be easier if you’re drinking beer instead of coffee. Time.com did a fairly concise job, though: Using an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or Google (GOOG) Android, “users can scan barcodes, attach a piece of information–either a video, note or audio recording–and receive a notification whenever someone else scans the same object. Stickybits also produces unique, one-off barcodes of its own that, when attached to a postcard, for example, add digital memory to static objects.”

So that sort of sounds fun, and there might even be some commercial applications: You can see how marketers might want to play around with tagging the bar codes on the stuff they sell, etc.

Founder Billy Chasen, a graduate of the Betaworks start-up incubator, says the company intends to court those commercial customers, via privileged access to its API, as well as a dashboard they could use to manage their bar codes.

But Chasen says his company won’t be consumed with consumer marketers. “It’s not going to turn into something where it’s just a tool for brands,” he says. “We want it to be fun.”

Cool! In the meantime, Stickybits is generating a couple dollars by selling those personalized barcode stickers. I bet someone has already slapped one on a bong.

The iLife software has integrated photo, video, music and Web-design applications meant for average, nontechnical consumers. It is better, in my view, than any comparable offering on the Windows platform, even those that cost extra.

This week, Apple (AAPL) released the latest version of the suite, called iLife ’09, and I have been testing it for a while. It includes five programs: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD. The new version will be bundled on new Macs, and current Mac owners can upgrade to it for $79.