WhatsApp rolls out a real-time location-sharing feature
It is arguably the case that a variety of tech tools makes our lives a lot better and, in the process, makes living much more pleasant and fulfilling. You can send messages without and with contents (attached documents, photos, videos, etc.) for no apparent cost to you. You can obtain access to “free” email services; […]
It is arguably the case that a variety of tech tools makes our lives a lot better and, in the process, makes living much more pleasant and fulfilling. You can send messages without and with contents (attached documents, photos, videos, etc.) for no apparent cost to you. You can obtain access to “free” email services; watch videos for free, listen to the world’s best music from Africa, and do a whole lot of things for free. You can even make free phone calls to virtually anywhere on earth. Moreover, there are thousands upon thousands of apps, say in Apple Store and Google Play, offering thousands of capabilities that can be downloaded and installed, requiring “no more” than a shared control of your detailed personal data and/or your metadata in the process.
Value addition by WhatsApp is particularly noteworthy. For example, the app frees us from the tight grip of the telcos – telecom operators, that is – who make their money by charging us – usually heftily – when we make phone calls. Not only can you send emails, messages, and contents with WhatsApp, you can also enjoy the location-sharing feature that allows permitted friends and family members to know your location at any point in time.
What is new about WhatsApp’s location-tracking capability is that, starting from a few days ago in selected countries, real-time location tracking has been enabled. A few applications of location-sharing in WhatsApp, be it static or dynamic, include: Letting your family and loved ones know where you are at all times; knowing whether or not your child made it back to school safely; finding out the location of your husband (boyfriend) or wife (girlfriend) at this very moment, knowing if your friend made it through the fracas that occurred in a certain city in the country, confirming that a friend or family member made it to a travel destination. For that matter, if for any reasons you want a particular person to know your whereabouts at any point in time or you are interested in knowing the whereabouts of a particular person in your life, this feature is for you. The usefulness of the app in terms of personal safety is obviously quite significant.
The end-to-end encryption feature of all WhatsApp messages comes in handy as well. With this feature only the sender and receiver of a message can read the message, so that intercepting WhatsApp messages is a fruitless exercise because the messages have to be decrypted to be read; something that is monumentally difficult to do. There are other safety valves in using the new location-tracking feature: The end-to-end encrypted feature allows you to control who you share your location with and for how long, and you can choose to stop sharing at any time or let a “Live Location” timer expire.
To access the new capability, open the WhatsApp app and the chat of the contacts you wish to share your live location with. Then, find the “Attach” option and click on the “Location” option, ensuring of course that your phone is GPS-enabled. Click on “Share live location” and set the duration of the time to share, which is 15 minutes and above. A “Stop sharing” option allows you to instantly stop sharing your location with a particular contact.
Although the real-time location-tracking feature may be new in WhatsApp, it is not exactly a new technology. For example, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Apple’s iMessage allow their users to share live locations in real-time. Moreover, on 19 December 2016, this column reported on Google’s “Trusted Contacts” app which had been released two weeks earlier. Trusted Contacts is also intended by Google to be a personal safety app that allows people to track your whereabouts at all time, if you leave the app running in the background.
Before Trusted Contacts Phone manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola have had these kinds of tools (at least the static version of the capability) baked into their devices: Samsung’s SOS service or Motorola Alert. Since Samsung phones are based on the Android OS, which didn’t support this capability, it’s no surprise that the SOS service hasn’t caught on. As for Alert, Motorola phones are no longer as popular. Apple’s iOS has “Find My Friend!” Even for Google, it’s kind of déjà vu, in the sense that a lot of the functionality in Trusted Contacts already exist in Google Latitude, a contact location app that has been built into Google Maps for several years. Latitude was discarded in favor of a location solution embedded in the social network called Google+ Location Sharing.
The implementation of this technology in WhatsApp is probably no more advanced than the earlier offerings by competing companies. However, it is different in the sense that WhatsApp is just so popular all over the world to merit the announcement of any potentially useful capability in the app.