A few tips to retain your privacy.

I love cool new apps — especially ones that keep me in touch with my friends and family members.

Find My Friends, an app that works on iOS 5 devices, is one of those apps. It plots the location — with stunning accuracy — for the people I connect with.

I wasted no time experimenting with it yesterday. By this morning, I had the locations for friends in Arizona, New Jersey, New York, Canada, England, and New Zealand. Zooming in on the map on my iPad put their dots on a street map. Tapping their bullets displayed their names, location label, and approximate street address.

Heck, as my husband drove off to work this morning, I could see his progress as he drove down the street! How cool is that?

But wait a minute. Is it really a good idea to let people know exactly where you are at any time of the day or night?

The answer is: it depends. Specifically, it depends on:

• Who you’re revealing your location to. Are these close friends and family members you know well and can trust? Or are they “friends” you met on Facebook or Twitter who might use your location information in ways you might not like?
• Why you’re revealing your location. Do you honestly want people to know where you are, perhaps for a meet-up or to keep track in a crowded mall or amusement park? Or is it just a cool feature to play with because its new?
• When you’re revealing your location. Are you sharing your location when you’re out in public and want to connect with people or keep them apprised of where you are? Or are you also sharing location information when you’re asleep, at work, or visiting other friends and family members, thus revealing their locations as well?

Find My Friends can be a great app for keeping in touch with your friends. Or it can be a tool for stalkers or burglars who can use your location information for their own purposes — which are not likely what you intended at all.

Here are a few things you can do to safely use Find My Friends:

• Only share your location information with people you know and trust very well. A good rule of thumb is this: If you have to provide a “friend” with your email address, there’s a good chance he’s not quite as “trusted” as he should be to have this information. Make sure those people understand that your information is not to be shared with others. Also make sure they understand the implications of sharing their own location.
• Make use of the Temporary Share feature. This enables you to create an event with a definite end time. Anyone who accepts the invitation to share their location using this feature will automatically stop sharing at a predetermined time. This is a great way to connect with friends at a park or mall without having to worry about them seeing where you are once the event is over.
• Disable Find My Friends when you don’t need it. On the device broadcasting your location (my iPhone, in my case), tap the Me button. Then set the option labeled “Hide from Followers” to ON. This removes your location from their devices. (I like to think of this as “stealth mode.”)

There are a few other security features built into Find My Friends:

• If you choose to decline an invitation to share your location, the person who invited you will not be able to see where you are. If you don’t know someone who is inviting you, be sure you don’t accept their invitation to share location!
• If you don’t lock your device, each time you enter Find My Friends, you’ll have to provide your Apple ID password. This is to prevent someone who has stolen or found your device from seeing the locations of your friends. You can disable this feature by requiring a password to access your device. You do this with the Password Lock option of General Settings.
• If you’re a parent, you can set up restrictions on your child’s device to prevent him or her from hiding. You do this with the Restrictions option of General Settings.

In conclusion, I have to say that I really do like the Find My Friends app. Sadly, other than checking to see how close my husband is to arriving home and possibly meeting up with friends at an outdoor venue, I don’t think I’ll get much use out of it. Right now, it’s just a fun thing to play with — with people I trust.

What do you think? Share your comments here.