Facebook To Discontinue 'Nearby Friends' and Other Location-Based Features

Facebook on Thursday began informing users that Nearby Friends and other location-based features will soon be discontinued at the end of the month. While the reasons are currently unclear, the company claims that all information related to these features will be deleted from Facebook's servers. 9to5Mac reports: Users have been getting a notification in the Facebook app for iOS and Android about the end of Nearby Friends, a feature that lets people share their current location with other Facebook friends. At the same time, Facebook also says that Time Alerts, Location History, and Background Location are also "going away soon." According to the company, Nearby Friends and other location-based features will no longer be available to users after May 31, 2022.

Some of the data, such as the user's location history (which automatically uses your location to create a map of places you have visited, will be available for download by August 1, 2022. After that, Facebook says that this data will be deleted. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that Facebook's app will stop collecting users' location. The company states that location data will still be collected "for other experiences." Of course, you can always disable the Facebook app's access to your location by going into the iOS Privacy settings.

You need friends for the feature to work

[thesjaakspoiler]

How was this featue supposed to work for all those facebook users without any friends?
Facebook policies are so much stricter than those of Instagram where you can show a duckface and your boobs and have +5000 friends instantly.
I'm like, with Facebook you have to type all these letters to get attention.

Re: You need friends for the feature to work

[oblom]

Such users were never the main audience for FB.

Back in the day...

[eyepeepackets]

...it was called spyware, now it's just called Facebook.

Re:

[Joce640k]

"Meta", please.

Start

[dohzer]

Well that's a start. When will the rest of Facebook's features be disabled?

Re:

[shanen]

Mod parent Funny, but mostly surprised the story was of so little interest on Slashdot.

Re: Start

[RegistrationIsDumb83]

No, who do you think they are? Google? :P

Facebook...

[rantrantrant]

...finally worked out that it's as creepy as fuck?

Re:

[GoTeam]

No, the citizen tracking program completed its beta run. Now that its in full production, we won't hear about it anymore. (source: my flawed brain, and observation)

Re:

[rantrantrant]

We know that Zuckerberg has his peons & algorithms watch our every move, that's a given & already creepy enough. A very good reason to never install social media apps on our phones. The "stalk your friends & acquaintances" feature, i.e. sharing some of that tracking data between users is the really creepy bit. Here's just one reason why you don't want just any users sharing their location with each other ("Piperchat port" clip from Silicon Valley; funny & disturbing at the same time): https: [youtube.com]