"Nearby Friends" Facebook's new feature to track your location, tellyour friends where are you and use it in Ads

As the past features, Facebook is in the right way to reduce its users privacy, for example we see the "seen" feature, the "actif since.." feature. Facebook also did many successful steps to encourage users to share everything with their friends that's why today the social media website has released the last feature which called "Nearby Friends" which simply track your location, tell your friends where are you, and use your location information for targeted ads.

But your location will not be used yet in targeted ads -According to Facebook- but it can be used in the next days or weeks or maybe months.

The "Nearby Friends" will be just for Facebook Mobile users and it's released for IOS and Android users this morning.

If you didn't understand how the Nearby Friends work I will tell you in one sentence: "It allow you to share your location information with your friends in the real time".

So when you put this feature ON, your friends will be noticed when you pass near their houses or work.. and the same for you (you will get a notification that your friend is near to you) and this will make the "Random" Meetings easier. 

“The mission of Facebook is to connect people, to bring people together," says Andrea Vaccari, the product manager for the new feature. "Nearby Friends sort of pushes that forward by making it a little easier to find new opportunities to meet your friends while you’re out and about.”

According to Facebook you can control this feature, that's mean you can turn it OFF if you don't want to share your current location (and to save your privacy) but Wait!! which Privacy ! is there privacy in facebook?!. 

Facebook said:

“Location History must be turned on for some location feature to work on Facebook, including Nearby Friends.” It also notes that “Facebook may still receive your most recent precise location so that you can, for example, post content that’s tagged with your location or find nearby places.”

That's mean Facebook has the right to collect your geographic location information even if the "Nearby Feature" is OFF, do you understand now why I think that there is no privacy online, and especially on facebook? Believe me, One day they will know when you're in the toilet, how much you stay and what you did there.

When you Activate the Nearby Friends an archive of Location History will be created, so you will be able to see the places you already visit, Facebook said that "only you can see your location history" but I think that it forgot to say that these location will be saved to facebook servers.

“The app learns where you spend most of your time, and it avoids sending notifications when you’re at those locations," explains Vaccari. Facebook collects this data and stores it on company servers, but Vaccari claims that it will never be used for purposes outside of Nearby Friends.

The feature is off by default so you're not obliged to use the nearby feature, but if you want to use it you can activate it from the Facebook menu in IOS and Android.

Nearby Friends And Targeted Ads

We talked too much about collecting information, and telling your friends where are you so let's talk a little bit about using the feature in targeted Ads.
You know that "Nearby Friends" will know where are you so this will be an amazing chance for facebook to use these information to show you the ads which are near to you and this will optimize the number of clicks for advertisers and they will get more targeted customers for their business.

For example, let's say that you have a restaurant in California and you want to advertise on Facebook, the ad will appear only for peoples in California near to your restaurant more than appearing to those in France so your chance to get more customers will be better.
And of course when the number of clicks will be optimized the earnings $$$ will be doubled.