Facebook's Nearby Friends Feature Says Goodbye This Month, Why?

Illustration. (Photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Facebook has just announced that they will remove the Nearby Friends feature at the end of this month. Unfortunately, Meta's social media did not reveal the reason.

Nearby Friends is actually a feature that allows users to share their current location with other Facebook friends.

When users choose to enable it, they can allow the GPS device or app on their iOS and Android smartphone or smartwatch to relay information back to Facebook, making it trackable by others.

After setting up Nearby Friends, users can then allow those on their friends list to view their GPS location. Users can also specify which groups of friends they want to give access to the location.

Then, users will be shown a live map showing other Facebook users on their friends list who are also using the Nearby Friends feature, approximated by their (but not exact) location on the map.

It also tells users how far away their friends are, and users can even call or message each other from the Nearby Friends interface.

Not only the location sharing feature, Facebook will also remove weather alerts, location history, and background locations on May 31, 2022.

Citing 9to5Mac, Sunday, April 8, some data, such as a user's location history will be available for download until August 1, 2022. After that, Facebook said that this data will be deleted.

However, this does not mean that the Facebook app will stop collecting user locations. The company states that location data will still be collected for other experiences.