An update to Apple’s Find My Friends app expands on your friends’ ability to know when you arrive at a specific location without you knowing, according to Ars Technica.
The Find My Friends app lets you locate friends who have shared their location with you through the app. You not only can see where your friends are, but the app lets you set up notifications for when they enter and leave a specific location as well. In this latest update, Apple now lets you expand that “geofence” from just that location to a radius around that location as far out as you’d like.
Apple intended the app to be used as a way to find people you’re meeting at a concert or know if someone is running late to a dinner because they’re stuck in traffic. But we all know there’s a seedy underbelly of humans who might use this type of tool to disrupt people’s privacy.
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As Ars Technica notes, Apple released the feature that allows you to choose a location and be alerted when a friend arrives at that location in September 2012. But now you can use the pinch-to-zoom feature to expand the radius of that location. For example, if you want to know every time your friend goes to the Ferry Building, you can expand that “circle” to know if they’ve even entered downtown San Francisco.
The update also now lets you search for locations to set up these geofenced alerts.
Of course, you can always stop sharing your location with a person if you feel they’re abusing the system, but it’s something to keep in mind regardless of how much your trust your contacts.
