Facebook’s scary new privacy policies, why doesn’t anyone know about this?!
In an ever-evolving digital world, Always Active Mobile strives to keep up with the developments and changes in the social media space.
Recently when doing some research on new features to Facebook Messenger Bots, we were met with a challenge. We discovered that Facebook had decided to remove their location functionality from all messenger bots in order to abide by their new privacy policies. The deadline for this has been set appropriately for Halloween, (the end of October) what a scare!!
As a regular user of location services on our Bots, how did we not hear about this sooner? Why didn’t Facebook send a notification by ways of a developer alert? This left us unsure of what will come of our bots that rely on location upload?
We checked on multiple forums and Developer Community groups for more information, even when chatting with Facebook developers/consultants we struggled to get much more clarity on the subject other than the fact that the function would indeed be removed.
Now, faced with quite a challenge, we had to come up with a resolution on how we would handle any location-based functionality on our clients location dependent Facebook bots.
Luckily, we had developed an add-on app called “My Loc8r” (my Locator). It is a location-based app that when installed and activated, pings a user’s device at the chosen time intervals to pick up and track their location.
This app was then re-purposed and linked into messenger to replace the location upload function that was once provided by Facebook.
Facebook is a great platform for business with easy usability and growing popularity in South Africa, so being able to keep our client’s services on the platform and finding a resolution to these sudden changes was definitely a big win for us and our clients.
So, if you find yourself in the same sticky situation or may have any location requirements for your bots or services, give us a shout!
