[kosei]

I'm not sure what value add this serves as an opt-out solution rather than opt-in. For people who have a strong desire to show their location, sure. But what possible reason could Facebook have to make this readily accessible to anyone you chat with on an opt-out only basis?

[pdkl95]

They could give the user a button or something to send their location into to whomever they are currently chatting with (to one person in person-to-person chat, or to the group in multi-user chat. This would give the user complete control over their data while still allowing most of the utility.

Of course, this wouldn't give facebook a detailed map of their user's movements.

[LLWM]

As long as you don't manually revoke the app's permission to know about your location after you send it, what would stop them from building that map?

[pdkl95]

Honor? Politeness? Wanting to cultivate a healthy, respectful relationship with their users by not going behind their back? Not being creepy stalker who spies on everybody just because you might be able to make a profit from it?

Of course, this is Facebook, which has been fighting with Google for the title of "most creepy, intrusive, privacy-destroying business model". With their ethics, the answer to "what would stop them" is obviously "nothing".

There is a significant PR difference - reporting the GPS location at regular intervals is currently "just part of the regular status update", where Facebook gets to act as a passive man-in-the-middle who records those updates. If sending the location data as seen in all user visible situations is a manually-triggered event, extra code to hand that data off at regular intervals only to Facebook wouldn't be able to hide under the assumption that "it's a feature". In an ideal world, this would be criminal access to unauthorized data. In the current environment of legalized spyware, we are back to "nothing" mentioned previously.

(The terrible granularity in the permission models in these environments is a huge problem. As it affects far more than just location data, that is a topic for another day)

[lucaspiller]

I'm guessing it's advertising / marketing related. Maybe they aren't doing anything yet with the data, but I'm sure the terms and conditions allow them to do whatever they want with it in the future. Being able to stalk your friends is how they make people willing to give them the data.

[kosei]

Here's the thing, though: they absolutely could do that without the user knowing (I'm sure plenty of companies do). By showing the location information to everyone, it makes this much more readily apparent to users and gives individual users way more information than is necessary. If Facebook wanted to get your location data through Messenger, they absolutely could do that fairly easily without notifying all of your friends of your whereabouts with every message.

Honestly, and maybe I'm in the minority, showing that information readily to my friends is MORE of a red flag than if Facebook solely had that data. Because let's be honest... they already have that data from my usage on the FB app (albeit at a lower frequency).

[rtpg]

"where are you?" "when will you show up?" "you back home yet?"

A lot of these things are questions I routinely get/ask in things like messenger. People with location on usually help us to coordinate things and the like.

[hug]

Google Hangouts solves this problem in a much more sane way -- Whenever my girlfriend sends me "where are you?" on hangouts, the application prompts me to send a map pin.

This solution probably isn't particularly novel, but it's probably better than carte blanche location access, in the opinion of most people.

[JeremyNT]

Google also provides opt-in location tracking via Google+ [0]. You specify who can view your location, and whether it is fine (GPS coordinates) or course (city-level).

My wife and I use this service and find it quite useful - it seems like a much more sane way to handle location sharing than to simply attach your exact location to every message you send by default.

Sadly, since it's buried in Google+, most people are probably unaware of it.

[0] https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2998354?hl=en

[jgroszko]

Yeah, this was supposed to be the replacement for Latitude right? You have to know exactly where it is in the app though to find it, it's really not very discoverable

[izacus]

But that doesn't really answer the question of why sending your location to everyone BY DEFAULT is a good idea.

[rtpg]

Yeah, I guess so. Beyond the malicious reasons, there could just be the thought that the utility outweighs the privacy costs for the user experience. Especially considering your FB friends are supposedly people you know in real life and trust (at least more than people you might have on other IM services).

I can understand the divisiveness, but I can also imagine people working on messenger (who probably use it a lot more than you or I) being on this, and genuinely believing it leads to a better user experience for most people (see read receipts).

[ge0rg]

your FB friends are supposedly people you know in real life and trust

According to the article, this feature is also enabled for group chats, where you converse with people who are not even your FB friends.

people working on messenger

I happen to be working on a mobile messenger [0], and I can see the benefit of transmitting user location. Still, I would never implement it as an on-by-default feature on all outgoing messages. Sending a location should always be an explicit action performed by the user, for battery preservation reasons as much as because of the privacy.

[0] https://yaxim.org/

[icebraining]

your FB friends are supposedly people you know in real life and trust

If the FB developers think that's generally true, I'd say they are pretty incompetent. Even my parents, with just a couple dozen friends, have FB friends they have never met, let alone my teenage brother and his friends, who have hundreds of FB friends each.

This is usually not a problem, since they don't post sensitive information on their timeline, only in the chat to specific people.

[monkeyprojects]

It probably actually is a problem but most people don't realise it.

Even when people are incredibly careful people do unwittingly post things that allow others to identify them. They may not reveal much in any individual post but when you combine a few together its a problem.

1 prime example is a friend who posted an invite to a house warming party then a week later posted from their holiday abroad...

[felipeerias]

The banality of evil: they got so used to tracking the exact location of their users at all times, and sharing that information with advertisers, that they didn't realise that it might not be a good idea to systematically leak it to other people.

[arbitrage]

Oh, I'm sure they knew what they were doing. They just don't care if it's a good idea for you. It's a great idea for them and their partners.

[com2kid]

The funny part is why Facebook sends the exact GPS coordinates. All the end users see if a rough estimate, typically the city name.