Facebook users in the U.S. will soon be able to see which of their friends are nearby using a new feature the company is launching on Thursday, according to CNN.
The "Nearby Friends" feature must be turned on by the user, so people shouldn't expect to broadcast their location unknowingly and will use your smartphone's GPS system to tell your Facebook friends you are nearby, CNN reported. Rather than share your exact location, it will show only that you are nearby, say, within half a mile.
Facebook will give the option for users to manually share a more precise location with a specific friend you'd like to meet up with, according to CNN.
Nearby Friends also won't be available to users under 18, said Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at Facebook. He said the tool "makes it easy to join your friends in the real world," according to CNN.
Nearby Friends launches amid the growing popularity of location-based mobile dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge, CNN reported. Unlike those apps, Facebook's feature will let you meet up only with people who are already your friends.
All the safeguards and slow rollout mean that most users won't have the feature available right away on Thursday but rather in the coming weeks and months, according to CNN.
Nearby Friends seems to be for the broader group of friends you enjoy spending time with but wouldn't necessarily call, CNN reported. Nearby Friends may provide that extra push, but users can limit whom they share their location with to smaller groups of friends.
Users who sign up will be shown a short tutorial on how the feature works and besides seeing friends who are nearby, users can also see which of their friends are traveling, and in general which friends are using the feature even if they are not nearby, according to CNN.
Facebook says there are no current plans to draw advertising revenue from Nearby Friends and added they do not currently target ads to users based on where they happen to be at the moment, but uses their stated "current city" and the location of their computer based on its numeric Internet Protocol address.
