A few days ago, WhatsApp released its live location feature, which allows users to share their location with their contacts on a live timeline. This means that the person you share your live location with can follow you until you turn it off. This is a very useful feature for many reasons. First, it is a great tool for people meeting in a common place. They can share their live location status with each other, enabling them to meet at the same place and at the same time. Secondly and more importantly, it is a very good safety feature for people traveling to unknown places. It’s always good to know that someone you can trust can track your location. This feature has piqued your interest, let’s see how you can use the WhatsApp live location feature:
Note: The update is being rolled out gradually. If you haven’t received it yet, you will in the next few days. However, if you want to try it right away, you can sign up for WhatsApp’s beta program by clicking. here.
Share Live Location on WhatsApp on Android or iPhone
This feature is placed in the same area where you can share your static location with people from the past. If you don’t know how to do this, follow the steps to learn how to share your live location data.
1. Launch WhatsApp and open the chat area of the person you want to share your location with. Now, Tap on the attachments icon marked in the image below.
2. Here, Tap on “Location”. On this page, you can see that you can share your current location or live location. When you share your current location someone can track where you are now, which is not what we want. We want to share our live location status, so, Tap where it says “Share live location”.
3. Now there will be a pop-up card describing the feature, you can tap it to learn more. However, as I have already explained, simply click “Continue”. you can here specify how long you want the other person to track your location. You have three options to choose from (15 minutes, 1 hour and 8 hours). Select the time, enter any comment if you want and then hit the submit button.
4. Now, you may be wondering, what if I wanted to Share my location data for more than an hour but less than 8 hours. So first share your location for 8 hours. When you want to stop sharing your data (for example after 3 hours), you need to open the chat of the person you shared your live location with and then Tap on “Stop sharing”. This will stop WhatsApp from sharing your live location.
As you can, it’s pretty easy to use WhatsApp to share your location data live. There is something I would like to point out here that if you do not use WhatsApp for any reason, you can also use this feature on Google Maps. Just Launch Google Maps and tap on the Hamburger menu. There you will find the option to share your live location using any messaging or email service. When the other party clicks or taps on the link, it will open the Google Maps app and follow you.
SEE ALSO: 15 Cool WhatsApp Tricks You Should Use
Share Your Live Location Data Using WhatsApp
I think this feature is a great addition to WhatsApp. Seeing that most of the people we know are on WhatsApp, it’s good that we can now easily share our live location data with people without the need to download a separate third-party app. However, this has created a concern among users about whether WhatsApp is constantly tracking you without your consent. Although there is no evidence to suggest this, I think it is a legitimate concern. Seeing how OnePlus was caught collecting user data a few days ago, the situation is not entirely unreasonable. Well, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Write what you think about this feature in the comments section below.
