Nearby Friends…Facebook’s Creepiest Feature Yet?

Facebook never exactly hide away from announcing controversial new features (see: Graph Search), but their latest app update could be their creepiest yet.

The social networking giants began rolling out the “Nearby Friends” feature to US users last week, a tool that allows you to be notified when your Facebook friends are nearby.

It adds a list of nearby friends to iOS and Android apps, as well as a pop up with a notification when your friends are nearby.

But before you start shutting down your Facebook profiles for fear of your weird ex discovering you’re just around the corner, don’t panic!

This feature is purely opt-in, and is only available to users over 18, as explained by Facebook’s Product Manager Andrea Vaccari:

“Nearby Friends is an optional feature. You can choose who can see if you’re nearby (for example: your friends, close friends, or a specific friends list) and you can turn it on and off at any time.

“Sharing your location with Nearby Friends goes two ways — you and your friends both have to turn on Nearby Friends and choose to share with each other to see when you’re nearby. Your friends will only be able to see that you’re nearby if you share this info with them and vice versa.”

Another available option with Nearby Friends is to share a precise location with a selected friend or group for a particular period of time, so you’ll never lose your friends ever again!

Facebook is also encouraging the use of its tool to recommend places to friends. As Andrea explains:

“When Nearby Friends is on, you can see when your friends are traveling if they’re also using this feature and sharing with you. You’ll be able to see the city or neighborhood they are in, including on their profile. When you see a friend visiting a place you’ve been, it’s the perfect opportunity to send a recommendation for a great restaurant. You can also make last-minute plans to meet up with a friend who happens to be in the same place you’re headed to.”

The good thing about Nearby Friends is that it encourages people to socialise in real life (what’s that?!), not just online via social media, and allows people to recommend places to visit in real time to friends when travelling.

This feature is basically Facebook sticking their fingers up at its critics who accuse the site of diminishing the amount of time people spend with each other in real life, not just staring at their phones.

Also, the feature will only share how far away you are from someone, unless you choose to share your exact location, which is handy in terms of privacy.

However, there are some cons!

If you’re like me and are extremely forgetful, chances are you’ll turn Nearby Friends on and then forget to turn it off ever again. This will make it really awkward when you’ve told your friends you can’t make a catch-up meal because you’re out of town, but then you pop up as “less than half a mile away”… whoops!

Facebook have also admitted that they’ll be tracking “Location History” for “marketing purposes”, which basically means target you with loads of location-relevant adverts. As if we’d expect anything less…

According to Tech Crunch, the description below the Location History setting in Nearby Friends says: “When Location History is on, Facebook builds a history of your precise location, even when you’re not using the app. See or delete this information in the Activity Log on your profile.”

It also says that the Location History feature must be switched on to use Nearby Friends. The article goes on to say that in the small print, Facebook says it will still collect your location information for a short while even after you have turned Location History off – scary!

So it seems like location advertising is the most likely scenario, with a Facebook spokesperson telling Tech Crunch: “at this time it’s not being used for advertising or marketing, but in the future it will be.”

It seems like this will be used in scenarios like when you’re 100 feet away from a restaurant with a special offer on, that advertisement will appear and encourage you to go to that restaurant, and the business will pay for the privilege of location-based advertising.

This will no doubt anger a lot of people who are already critical of Facebook’s lax privacy morals when it comes to advertising, but they will be reassured by the fact that you can delete your location tracking from your activity log to avoid being targeted by this sort of advertising.

What do you think of Facebook’s latest controversial feature? Is it a fun tool to help you meet up with friends, or one ridden with privacy concerns?

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1gSnJYQ