Whatsapp's new feature to let users track their friends in realtime
31 Jan 2017
According to reports, Whatsapp's upcoming feature might get the thumbs down from privacy watchdogs, as the Facebook-owned messaging service would allow users to track their contacts' locations in real-time.
The feature called Live Location Tracking would allow Whatsapp users to broadcast their current location and they would also have the option of enabling location tracking to anyone in their Whatsapp contact list with up to one minute, two minutes and five minutes intervals.
Whatsapp already allows users to drop a location pin and share it with their friends and contacts, though, real-time Live Location Tracking is a completely different ballgame. According to commentators, the privacy stakes would be really high to prevent things from going seriously wrong.
WhatsApp is taking steps to address that possibility and Live Location Tracking is expected to be disabled by default when it finally arrives, in order to address privacy fears.
Whatsapp users who were curious to know how Live Location Tracking worked would need to manually turn it on through the app's Settings menu.
As of now, Live Location Tracking is baked into the beta version of Whatsapp on both Android (version 2.16.399) and iOS (version 2.17.3.28) platforms. Whatsapp has not offered any details as to when exactly the live in tracking feature would get the green-signal for the final, end-user build of the messaging app.
Meanwhile, ndtv.com cited WABetaInfo, which keeps track of changes in the WhatsApp beta builds, that apart from the live location feature, the app's beta version 2.17.3.28 for iOS would bring the ability to save photos from WhatsApp into a separate folder in the camera roll by default.
There is a new 'Contact Us' action button that could presumably allow users to send feedback to the developers directly. WhatsApp had also added the ability to send a notification to a user who is running out of battery during live call.
