Facebook Improves Privacy For Its ‘Nearby Friends’ Feature

Facebook has this feature called “Nearby Friends”, which if you have enabled will allow your friends to see if they are near you, and vice versa. In fact it is almost downright creepy because it would even pinpoint where exactly they are on the map. However for those who were a little creeped out by that, you’ll be pleased to learn that Facebook has made some changes.

As noted by TechCrunch, the “Nearby Friends” feature no longer pinpoints your friends on the map. Instead if you want to see if anyone is near you, you’ll get an approximate distance and you can message them to say what’s up and if they want to meet up, instead of just showing up out of the blue, which like we said is a bit creepy.

It also seems that in addition to removing them from the maps, Facebook has introduced a new feature in the form of “Wave”. Basically this is a variation of the “Poke” feature in which if you see a friend nearby, you can send them a digital wave if you don’t want to start up a conversation, similar to the honking feature in Waze when you see friends online.

In any case these changes should already have been implemented, so if you do rely on Nearby Friends quite a bit, you’ll have to get used to no longer being able to see your friends on a map.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Privacy