Facebook Nearby Friends Feature: Get Ready for Some Stalking!

Facebook is a powerful tool when it comes to connecting with people that you’ve met, as well as being arguably the most important social networking site on the planet. This can be both good and bad, and while I’m not sure if I want to share my location at all times on my timeline, I’m sure that it could be useful in some cases.

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Facebook’s new Nearby Friends feature is disabled by default. It allows you to get alerts when some of your FB friends are nearby. It could definitely makes things easier when you’re out on the town, in the same general area, but have trouble actually locating your friends, something that actually happened to me today.

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While I can also see the possible problems of such a feature, when it comes to stalkers, etc, at least it’s fully optional, and defaults to being switched off. The problem is that a lot of people aren’t going to remember to switch back off when they don’t want it running. They’ll just leave it on once they set it and forget it. At least you can choose who you do and don’t share your location with, so that should help some.

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What do you think of this feature? Are you going to enable it on your phone?

[via Facebook]