How to Share your Live Location with Friends on WhatsApp

WhatsApp recently added LiveLocation feature to the app, making it feasible now for anyone you like (or whatsapp themselves) to keep track of your movements. Whatever it is, this one feature can prove useful in a lot of situations especially if you are vulnerable while traveling. You can share your travelling path with your family or friends, ask your friend to follow you if they are unaware of the route or simply convince your boss that you are really stuck in the traffic.

Here are the steps to use it:

1. In WhatsApp, open up the chat of your reliable contact with whom you want to share your live location with.

2. Tap the little PaperClip icon,in the bottom left of screen, which lets you share stuff with this buddy of yours.Choose Location out of the options available to you.

3. Choose LiveLocation. Grant permissions if any required.

4.  Set the time-interval upto which you want to share your location from the only three options available as of now: 15 minutes, 1 Hour or 8 Hours. Add any comments if you want. Click on the send icon on the bottom right.

5. Bravo, you are done. You can stop the sharing of live location anytime by clicking on the StopSharing option, or else it will automatically stop after some time. It is always advisable to stop this service as soon as the purpose of sharing live location is done.

Though these services are handy in a lot of situations, overusing them might lead to bad results and unwanted experiences. Firstly, this feature will eat a lot of battery of your smartphone, as it continuously uses GPS sensors and mobile data (along with other things) to determine and share your location. If misused, this may allow others to gain access to your real-time location, which attackers might misuse. So always be careful with whom you are sharing your live location (or any detail for that matter) and if you see the GPS icon on your notifications tab continuously, you know where to check and how to stop it now.

Nevertheless, these small feature comes very handy at times and if used carefully, may help you save a lot of time, effort and money. If you are a privacy conscious person, you might restrict yourself from using it quite often as who knows, apart from your friend, who else has access to that live location of yours.