‘Facebook always comes up with something new and exciting. This time once again, Facebook has come up with an app “Nearby Friends” that will tell you about your friends present around you within 1 km radius. It is currently being tested in USA. To get to know about the your friends’ locations, application must be turned on so that your location is also not broadcasted unintentionally. Furthermore, this app must be active on your friends’ mobiles as well. As you turn on this feature, your Facebook friends will be able to know about your position as located by your smartphone GPS. It is also possible to customize the 1 km range. You can customize the app to give a more precise position of your location. Like it is also possible to share exactly in which block of the city or airport you are at the moment.
The location is shared for one hour by default but as we said it is customizable and so can be changed. There are some other apps also available like Tinder and Hinge but Facebook app is far better than others. These two apps let everyone knows about your location while Facebook notifies only your friends. Hence, we can say that Facebook is becoming more concerned for the privacy of its billion users. Jules Polonetsky is the director of “Future of Privacy Forum” and according to him new slogan of facebook “Ship Love” is clear from the this app.
He says, “Facebook is showing a deeper appreciation that with a billion users, any change needs to be implemented in a way that doesn’t surprise the audience.” It becomes crucial especially when we are talking about the privacy and location sharing. He added, “Once you start bringing this to a mass audience, you need to be cautious, so inadvertent oversharing is not possible.”
According to product manager Andrea Vaccari, this app is not made available for people under the age of 18. The app is built with a motto to make it easy to contact your friends in the real world. The service will be available after a great deal of testing which might take weeks or even months. At first stage product will only be tested by volunteers. The service is not being imposed on everyone but product manager is pretty sure that it would become popular. For the time being, it is being tested by the employees of Facebook and Veccari is hopeful about its bright future. So, this app can have an impact on our social lives as two friends/relatives landing from different flights at the same time may share a taxi to go home and family can gather at one place.