You can see exactly where your Facebook friends are in real time, but only if they let you
Facebook on Thursday took the wraps off of a new feature that, depending on your perspective, is either incredibly cool or incredibly creepy. For this reason, the company has wisely decided to make this new feature strictly an opt-in affair to avoid completely freaking out users who are sensitive to privacy.
The new feature, called Nearby Friends, lets you “occasionally be notified when friends are nearby, so you can get in touch with them and meet up.” The feature lets you and your friends give your precise locations in real time, although you have to explicitly give the app permission before it’s allowed to do so. More crucially, the new feature won’t flip on at all unless you specifically tell it to, which means that Facebook users won’t be unwittingly telling the world where they are through their smartphones.
Facebook says it’s rolling out its Nearby Friends feature on its iOS and Android apps in the coming weeks.
More from BGR: Galaxy S5 vs. HTC One (M8): Which is the best Android phone in the world?
This article was originally published on BGR.com
Related stories
Would you trust Facebook to be your bank?
Here's how to protect yourself with two-step verification on 11 top websites
Facebook is rolling out privacy-guarding features for a change
