Facebook launches friend-tracking feature for tracking nearby friends in real time
Facebook has began rolling out a new opt-in
feature called Nearby Friends. It lets friends see
approximately how far away you are from them,
and you can share your exact, on-going location
with them for a limited time. While it’s sure to
stir privacy concerns, Nearby Friends could get
people spending more time with friends in the
real-world instead of online as it hits iOS and
Android in the US in the coming weeks.
It works by adding a list of
nearby friends to Facebook’s iOS and Android
apps. It will also send notifications if you come
within a short distance of a friend, and if
someone shares their precise location with you
you’ll see it on a map.
Vaccari the man behind the technology told Techcrunch,“the idea is to make it really
easy to discover when someone is around you,
and meet up and spend time together.” It
wants to facilitate those serendipitous meetups
where you run into a friend and end up having
a meal or hanging out together. It’s a
meatspace manifestation of Facebook’s mission
to connect people, and a rebuttal to criticism
that Facebook isolates us.
As for privacy, Nearby Friends is opt-in so you
can ignore it and never have to use it if you
don’t want to. It’s only available to people over
18. It uses a reciprocal privacy model so you
can only see your proximity to friends if you
both have it turned on, and you can only see
someone’s exact location if they purposefully
share it with you. While you can select the
specific list or group of friends you want to
share your proximity with, many people may
simply keep this visible to all their friends — a
very wide net. This and how easy it is to forget
to turn off Nearby Friends could lead to
inadvertent “oversharing”. [ Update: And
Facebook confirms it will use your Nearby
Friends Location History to target you with ads .]
If people manage their privacy with the
provided tools, Nearby Friends could help them
gather with more friends for Tuesday dinners,
Friday night parties, or Saturdays in the park.
How you use the Facebook Nearby friends Feature
Once you get the rollout of Nearby Friends,
you’ll see it in their app list in the Facebook
navigation menu under “More” on iOS or
Android. From there you can opt in to turning
Nearby Friends on, and select if you want to
share your proximity with all your friends, or a
specific friend list or group.
You’ll then be able to see a Nearby Friends list
that shows the distance away in increments of a
mile.
For being a feature that constantly shares your
proximity to friends or your exact location,
Facebook tried to make it respect our privacy.
It’s opt-in, so no one will find it themselves
sharing their coordinates without purposefully
turning it on. You can turn it off any time with
a few taps. You can set who sees your proximity,
they have to be sharing their proximity with you
to see yours, you have to explicitly share exact
location, and unless you set it to share
indefinitely, your exact location will disappear
within a day.
the down side of this feature
the worst case scenario might be that
your boss sees you’re somewhere close to a bar
district at 2am or not near your apartment. Or a
spouse sees you’re not getting closer to home
after work — maybe because you’re getting a
beer with buddies, but maybe because you’re…
Which brings up the issue of partners
essentially stalking each other by forcing one
anothe to constantly share their exact location.
the new Facebook "feature" is pretty
dangerous. It is sending your location
information on a continuing basis into a
network run by Facebook. Among the
problems: your GPS is always on if you use
this APP, meaning you can be followed by
hackers, intruders or government agencies
more or less at will. And Facebook itself,
which is not a secure system, also can be
targeted by the same folks.
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