Snapchat Launches Location Sharing Feature With Trusted Friends

JAKARTA - Snap continues to add new features to Snapchat, to make content creators feel at home on their social media. This time, the company launched a location sharing feature.

This feature allows users to share their real-time location with people they trust, family, friends or girlfriends. This location sharing is certainly quite useful, it is a new way for nearby people to track the whereabouts of the location sender while traveling.

Overall, this feature is very similar to the Find My app on iOS. There are several uses for this location sharing feature, such as increased safety when traveling on unknown routes or in a taxi. Content creators can also use it to let friends know how far they are from home when they travel.

Snap says that content creators can enable location sharing for 15 minutes or up to several hours with individual users. However, the location will only be shown for selecting mutual friends in the app.

Launching The Verge, Monday, February 21, this feature is off by default and there is no option that allows content creators to share their location with everyone on their friends list.

The company says that to prevent stalking, it allows content creators to turn off live location sharing without notifying those involved.

For this first attempt, Snap has partnered with It's On Us, a nonprofit that aims to stop sexual assault on campus.

Content creators can enable live location sharing by visiting a friend's profile and then selecting how long they want to share their location. After that, they can see the location directly from their shared chat box.

For your information, this new feature is the first live location feature for Snapchat. True content creators already have the option to let friends see where they last used the app, which populates a Snap Map, and is already used by 250 million Snapchat users per month.