Latest feature rolled out by Whatsapp on 20 Oct 2017
“Whether you’re meeting up with friends, letting loved ones know you’re safe, or sharing your commute, Live Location is a simple and secure way to let people know where you are,” the company said in the blog post announcing the new feature.
- WhatsApp already allows you to share your location, but that’s only your present location, as a one-time share. That’s helpful for telling someone where to come, for example, but less useful if you want someone to be able to see how far away you’ve reached.
- With live location sharing, the location is dynamic and updates in real time, even after you leave the WhatsApp app. You can share your location to another person, to let a family member know where you are on your commute home, or to a group chat, so your friends can see how far away you are from a party.
- This feature is fully opt-in, and is temporary in nature, sharing location for between 15 minutes, 1 hour, and 8 hours, depending on what you select. At other times, WhatsApp does not share your location with others. You can also manually stop sharing location data within a chat at any time.
- You can view the location of users sharing their live location with you in a map view, and you’ll see the names of the users along with a timestamp to show the freshness of that data.
- In groups, you’ll be able to see all users sharing their location with the group in the group information view, which sounds very useful if you’re trying to coordinate a lot of people. And of course, any of those people can choose to stop sharing their location anytime.
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