Introduction
On June 1, 2022, Facebook quietly deprecated its Nearby Friends feature, along with several other location-based tools including Weather Alerts, Location History, and Background Location. For many users, the move came as a shock – the sudden disappearance of a feature that had become a staple of their social media experience. But for those following the evolving landscape of data privacy, it signaled a larger shift in the way tech giants are approaching the handling of user location data.
In this article, we‘ll take a deep dive into the rise and fall of Nearby Friends, examining the technical underpinnings of the feature, its impact on user behavior and relationships, and what its removal tells us about the future of location-based social networking. We‘ll also explore some workarounds and alternatives for those seeking to maintain location-sharing capabilities, and hear from experts in privacy, psychology, and technology on the implications of this change.
The Inner Workings of Nearby Friends
Launched in 2014, Nearby Friends made use of the location services built into modern smartphones to allow Facebook users to continuously share their real-time location with friends. The feature relied on a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular network triangulation to pinpoint a user‘s precise location, which was then transmitted back to Facebook‘s servers.
Users who opted into Nearby Friends could see a list of their friends who were also using the feature, sorted by proximity. The interface displayed each friend‘s approximate distance, along with a timestamp indicating when their location was last updated. Users could set custom proximity alerts to be notified when friends were within a certain radius, facilitating spontaneous meetups and serendipitous encounters.
Behind the scenes, Nearby Friends made extensive use of background location tracking, a practice that has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Even when the Facebook app wasn‘t actively running, it would periodically wake up in the background to fetch the user‘s current location and upload it to the server. This allowed for the real-time updating of friends‘ relative positions, but also meant that Facebook was amassing a detailed record of users‘ moment-to-moment geographical movements.
Location Sharing by the Numbers
At its peak, Nearby Friends was a widely adopted feature, though exact usage numbers have been hard to come by. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of U.S. Facebook users aged 13-17 used the platform‘s location-tagging features, though this included check-ins and other location-based tools beyond Nearby Friends.
Separate data from the advertising analytics firm Sprout Social sheds light on the overall popularity of location sharing across social media platforms. As of 2021, 88% of Facebook users reported engaging with the platform‘s location tagging features in some form, compared to 83% for Instagram, 50% for Twitter, and just 35% for LinkedIn.
While these figures don‘t isolate Nearby Friends usage specifically, they suggest a high degree of comfort with location sharing among Facebook‘s user base leading up to the feature‘s removal. A 2020 survey by The Manifest further underscores this point, finding that 64% of U.S. social media users were comfortable with social platforms tracking their geographic location.
Location Tracking and the Attention Economy
To understand the rise of features like Nearby Friends, it‘s important to situate them within the larger context of the attention economy and surveillance capitalism. In an attention economy, human attention is treated as a scarce commodity, and companies compete to capture and monetize as much of it as possible. For social media platforms, one key strategy for driving engagement is to create features that encourage users to spend more time within the app.
Location-based features like Nearby Friends play directly into this dynamic. By surfacing opportunities for real-world social interaction through the app, Facebook was able to position itself as a mediator of users‘ offline social lives, driving increased reliance on the platform. The granular location data collected through the feature also served to enhance the platform‘s targeting capabilities for advertisers, allowing for the delivery of hyper-local, context-specific ads.
As Shoshana Zuboff argues in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," this business model represents a new form of economic logic, one in which human experience itself is claimed as a free raw material for commercial exploitation. The removal of Nearby Friends can thus be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of the growing public unease with this arrangement, and a recognition that the costs of unfettered location tracking may be starting to outweigh the benefits for platforms like Facebook.
The Psychological Toll of Constant Tracking
Beyond the economic implications, the always-on location tracking enabled by features like Nearby Friends also raises questions about the psychological impacts of perpetual surveillance. Research has shown that the awareness of being continually monitored can lead to increased stress, anxiety, and self-censorship, as individuals feel pressure to conform to perceived social norms and expectations.
In the context of location sharing, this can manifest as a fear of judgment for one‘s whereabouts and activities, or a sense of obligation to be constantly available and responsive to social invitations. As psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne explains, "The knowledge that others can see your every move can be incredibly stressful. It creates a sense of being ‘on‘ all the time, which can be exhausting and lead to burnout."
The removal of Nearby Friends may help to alleviate some of this pressure, but it‘s important to recognize that the underlying dynamic of constant connectivity and surveillance extends beyond any single feature. As long as our devices are capable of tracking our location, there will be a temptation for companies to leverage that data for commercial gain, and a corresponding burden on individuals to manage their privacy in an increasingly transparent world.
The Future of Location Sharing
So what does the future hold for location-based social networking in a post-Nearby Friends world? While the feature‘s removal represents a notable shift, it‘s unlikely to mark the end of location sharing as a social media staple. Other platforms like Snapchat and Foursquare continue to offer similar capabilities, and the allure of serendipitous real-world connection remains strong for many users.
However, we are likely to see a continued evolution in the way location data is handled and surfaced by social platforms. Apple‘s introduction of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5, which requires apps to obtain explicit user permission for cross-app tracking, has set a new standard for user control over location data. Other platforms are likely to follow suit, providing more granular privacy settings and emphasizing transparency around data collection and usage.
We may also see a shift towards more ephemeral and contextual forms of location sharing. Rather than perpetual background tracking, future features may allow users to share their location selectively and temporarily, such as for the duration of an event or a night out with friends. This would provide the benefits of location-based coordination without the privacy concerns of always-on tracking.
As Jen King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, puts it: "The future of location sharing will be about giving users more control and agency over when and how their location data is used. We‘re moving away from the model of pervasive background tracking and towards a more intentional, user-driven approach."
Conclusion
The deprecation of Facebook‘s Nearby Friends feature marks a significant moment in the evolution of location-based social networking. As one of the most prominent examples of always-on location sharing, its removal signals a growing recognition of the privacy implications of perpetual tracking, and a shift towards more transparent and user-centric approaches to location data.
While the feature will be missed by some users who had come to rely on it for facilitating real-world connections, its absence also presents an opportunity to reconsider our relationship to location sharing and the attention economy more broadly. By taking a more intentional approach to when and how we share our location, we can begin to reclaim some of the agency and control that has been eroded by the pervasive surveillance of the digital age.
Ultimately, the future of location-based social networking will be shaped by the ongoing dialogue between users, platforms, and regulators as we work to strike a balance between the benefits of location-aware services and the imperative to protect individual privacy. The removal of Nearby Friends is a reminder that this balance is not a given, but rather something that must be actively negotiated and renegotiated as technology and societal norms continue to evolve.
