App know where your friends are

Story highlights

    Facebook's Nearby Friends feature shares your general location with chosen friends The tracking tool is opt-in so people won't accidentally share their location by default Nearby Friends also has an option for sharing a user's exact location on a map

Your phone always knows where you are. And now, if you want, your Facebook friends will always know where you are, too.

App know where your friends are

Facebook is introducing a mobile feature called Nearby Friends that taps into that steady stream of location information so friends can track each other in real time.

ads

The idea is to make it easy for people to meet up in real life, so they can have conversations in person instead of comment threads, temporarily replacing Likes and LOLs with eye contact and actual laughter. A live meet-up is also an excellent opportunity to grab a selfie with your pal and upload it to the Facebook owned Instagram.

In a refreshing change, the new Nearby Friends feature is not turned on by default.

Friends will not be able to see where you are unless you decide live-tracking is something you want in your life and visit Facebook's settings to turn it on. Making a potentially invasive new feature opt-in suggests Facebook has perhaps learned from some of its past mistakes and privacy problems.

Related posts

  • Four ways to share your exact location with family (and why) Checking in on a family member in 2016 is much easier than ever, and perhaps less invasive, too. We don't have to call or text to...

  • iDownloadBlog March 25, 2014 16 comments How to add a color keyboard to iOS 7 Jeff Benjamin Sometimes you just want to switch up the look and feel of things, and that is what Color Keyboard for...

  • New app gives photos a kaleidoscope mirror effect Reviewed A screencap from Mirrorgram for iOS A screencap from Mirrorgram for iOS less If you've ever wanted kaleidoscope-style mirror effects...

  • 4 Ways to Make Your Rooted Android Phone Run Faster Yesterday we saw 5 useful ways in which a user can speed up his non-rooted Android phone. As we already mentioned that a rooted Android...

  • 20 Creative Apps For Your iPhone By Natasha Wescoat 2009-08-29 06:53:38 UTC We all know that the iPhone does a lot more than just call your friends. As an application platform, the iPhone has...