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The Newest Facebook Feature: Sharing Your Location with Friends

By Alyssa Bereznak, Tech Columnist

Facebook knows a lot about you, including, in many cases, the location you’re posting from. Now the social network wants other people to know where you are, too.

On Thursday, Facebook announced that it will be rolling out a new feature called “Nearby Friends.” The feature will allow you to see your approximate distance from anyone within your network. You’ll also be able to continuously share your location with other people for a limited amount of time.

The good news? It’s an opt-in feature, meaning it’ll be enabled only for those who want to use it.

It works like this: Once the feature becomes available to you on iOS or Android in the next couple of weeks, you’ll see the Nearby Friends option in the app list on your navigation menu. You can choose to turn it on for your entire social network, or to limit the people who can see your location to a specific friend list.

Then a list of your (geographically) closest friends will show up, ranked by how many miles they are from you. Again, you’ll see only the people who have also turned on the feature and allowed you to see them. The list will display a timestamp next to each person so that you’ll know exactly when Facebook registered her location. Finally, if you’re in a metropolitan area, the app will do you the favor of including the name of the neighborhood the person is in.

A location-services feature like this is not at all novel. Foursquare’s entire business revolves around whether you can see if your friends have checked in around you. And the now-defunct Google Latitude worked with the company’s Maps app to do essentially the same thing as Nearby Friends. There are even entire apps, like Connect, SocialRadar, and Cloak, that are dedicated to culling the information provided by your friends’ social networks in order to map the location of their last digital interaction (so you can either connect with them or avoid them).

What’s somewhat eerie about this feature, however, is how expansive each Facebook member’s social network remains. Facebook is a community where family, friends, colleagues, and old high-school acquaintances congeal into one large blob of connections unless you are constantly pruning your sharing settings. If you forget to leave your Nearby Friends feature off, it could potentially allow for less-than-comfortable stalking from your friends and family.

For now, it seems that Facebook has made it easy to differentiate who you’re sharing your current location with. But as even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister has proved, it hasn’t always had the best reputation for making matters of privacy easy to understand.

If you do choose to try it out, I’d recommend making a list of trusted friends you feel comfortable sharing your location with. That way you never risk airing your private information to an audience of strangers.

Follow Alyssa Bereznak on Twitter or email her here.

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