A number of interesting new features have been spotted in the WhatsApp beta for iOS and Android recently, one of which appears to be live location tracking.
It appears that the Live Location feature will display your real-time location to those you chat to in groups using WhatsApp. The feature was spotted by Twitter user WABetaInfo, although exactly where your location will be made visible isn’t clear.
Naturally, a feature like this has the potential to raise concerns with regards to privacy. To address these concerns, the Live Location feature will be disabled until the user manually opts in via the app’s settings menu.
Just think of all the fibs and lame excuses that could be exposed if this wasn’t the case – all those people who tell you they’re five minutes away when they haven’t left the house yet would be rumbled.
In or out
Those who don’t want to have their location constantly on display (that’ll be the majority of users we imagine), but who would find the feature useful in certain scenarios, will have the option to enable the feature for a limited window of one, two or five minutes.
This isn’t the only interesting feature that’s been spotted in the app’s Android beta. There are also reports that we could soon see the ability to edit messages we’ve sent, as well as recall messages you wish you hadn’t sent at all.
It would only be possible to edit or recall messages that haven’t been read, though, so you’ll still have to live with those mid-conversation regrets – at least until WhatsApp develops a memory-wiping feature.
Although these features have been spotted in the beta it’s not clear when they’ll be rolled out, or whether they’ll be rolled out exactly as they appear in the beta.
