Facebook will soon no longer notify you about the weather, or a friend in your area. That’s because Meta is changing how its location services work in the app. Users started receiving notifications last week saying that Nearby Friends and other location-based services will be eliminated on 31 May 2022.
More info: pic.twitter.com/UCO1e8R6Lr
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) May 5, 2022
“Nearby Friends and Weather alerts will no longer be available after May 31, 2022. Information you shared that was used for these experiences, including Location History and Background Location, will stop being collected after May 31, 2022, even if you have previously enabled them,” said Facebook
All previously collected location-based information will be permanently deleted by 1 August 2022. You can download your location history, like the places you’ve visited before that. After that date, it’ll all be unavailable.
Why, Facebook?
SocialMediaToday asked Facebook why these changes are happening and received the following answer:
“While we’re deprecating some location-based features on Facebook due to low usage, people can still use Location Services to manage how their location information is collected and used.”
So people are not checking in like they used to. We wonder if it is all those murder documentaries women are watching or are we as a society just over the always-being-tracked fad?
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean Facebook will stop collecting users’ location data. The company says that location data will still be collected “for other experiences”, as per its user agreement.
Disable location tracking
If Facebook’s move doesn’t go far enough for you, then perhaps you’d like to turn location tracking off completely. It’s really simple to do this, by turning off the function in either the Android or iOS operating systems.
On Android, this is found either under Settings, then Location, or Security and Location, or Security and then Location (depending on your device). In iOS, it’s under your Privacy settings. Just remember to allow tracking for certain apps, such as Maps (Google or otherwise), for instance.
Source: SocialMediaToday