Facebook rolls out feature to share location

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Facebook users in the U.S. soon will be able to see which of their friends are nearby using a new feature the company launched Thursday.

The “Nearby Friends” feature must be turned on by the user, so people shouldn’t expect to broadcast their location unknowingly. It will use your smartphone’s GPS system to tell your Facebook friends you are nearby — provided they have the feature turned on as well. Rather than share your exact location, it will show only that you are nearby, say, within half a mile.

If you like, you can manually share a more-precise location with a specific friend you’d like to meet up with. Friends can see where you’re located in a particular park, airport or city block. By default, your exact location will be shared for only an hour, although you can change this.

Nearby Friends launches amid the growing popularity of location-based mobile dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge. But unlike those apps, Facebook’s feature will let you meet up only with people who are already your friends.

Facebook, whose motto long has been “move fast and break things,” built a lot of precautions in this new tool as it tries to avoid privacy fiascos that often bubble up when it makes changes to its service.

The new motto, “ship love,” is evident in the cautious rollout of Nearby Friends, said Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed think tank in Washington. He has advised Facebook on privacy issues, including the latest feature.

He believes 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.” That’s especially so when it comes to privacy, especially when it comes to location sharing.

Nearby Friends won’t be available to users under 18, said Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at Facebook.

Of course, all the safeguards and slow rollout mean that most users won’t have the feature available right away but rather in the coming weeks and months.