Facebook launches location sharing feature in US

Facebook users in the US will soon be able to see which of their friends were nearby using a new feature the company would launch this week.

The ''Nearby Friends'' feature would need to be turned on by the users, so that their location does not get broadcast unknowingly.

The feature would use the GPS system of the smartphone for people to tell their Facebook friends they were nearby - provided they too had the feature turned on.

Rather than share users' exact location, it would only show friends were nearby, say, within half a mile. If one liked, one could manually share a more precise location with a specific friend on would like to meet up with.

Friends could see where one was located in a particular park, airport or city block. By default, one's exact location would be shared for only an hour, although this could be changed.

Nearby Friends launched amid the growing popularity of location-based mobile dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge, but unlike those apps, Facebook's feature would let users meet up only with people who were already users' friends.

Nearby Friends would not be available to users under 18, according to Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at Facebook.

''If you turn on Nearby Friends, you'll occasionally be notified when friends are nearby, so you can get in touch with them and meet up,'' said Vaccari in a release. ''If you turn on Nearby Friends, you can also choose to share a precise location with the particular friends you choose for a set period of time, such as the next hour. When you share your precise location, the friend you choose will see exactly where you are on a map, which helps you find each other.''

Though Facebook did not mention any specific date for the feature to become available to everyone, according to Vaccari the company started rolling it out on Thursday.

Meanwhile www.usnews.com quoted  Chris Conley, a policy attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union as saying Facebook was right to make the feature opt-in and to explain what other users of the app would see, but they needed to make clear how the location data would be used, shared and possibly monetised in forms like advertising.