Snapchat is providing you with yet another tool to keep yourself and your pals safe after a night out or when you go on a date. Snap Map is getting a temporary live location sharing function to make sure you and your friends travel home safely by tracking each other’s moves until you arrive at your destination. This live location sharing tool acts as a buddy system, allowing friends to keep track of one another’s whereabouts for safety reasons.

Snapchat has teamed with It’s On Us, a national nonprofit initiative dedicated to preventing sexual assault on college campuses, for this safety feature. The app’s location sharing feature isn’t entirely new. On Snapchat, you can already view someone’s most recent location, but this function only displays your approximate location and only updates your location information when you open the app.

In an announcement shared on Twitter, Nia Sioux shared: “Wherever you are, your safety is important to the people who love you. Snapchat’s new temporary location-sharing tool and resource portal help us all stay safe. Spread the word, take the @ItsOnUs pledge, and help us fight to stop sexual assault 👉🏾 http://itsonus.org/snap”

Snapchat’s live location sharing function lets you broadcast your exact location in real time with your closest friends and family. This allows specified contacts to keep track of your travels until you arrive at your destination, or feel safe enough to cease sharing. Users must mutually opt into live location sharing in order to use it, similar to Apple’s “Find My Friends” feature, which means you must be friends with whoever you choose to share your live location with.

You may broadcast your live position on Snapchat for a predetermined length of time, similar to WhatsApp’s live location sharing feature—either 15 minutes, one hour, or even eight hours. By default, the feature is disabled, and there is no option to share your live location with all of your Snapchat friends.

How to enable and use Snapchat’s live-location sharing

To enable live location sharing, go to your friend’s profile and select the amount of time you want to share your current location with them. In the chat window with that person, you may keep track of the status of the live location sharing.

Snapchat’s live location sharing gives you the peace of mind that someone is following your every step to make sure you’re safe and heading in the right way. Your friends will always know where you are because your location is shared in real-time, as long as you don’t cease sharing your location. They can also call you if they have any concerns to ensure that you are safe.

You can stop sharing your current location without telling the friend who is following you. The feature’s transient nature means that no one can monitor you all day, every day, unless you keep sharing it every time it stops sharing.

Finally, because you can only share your live location with those you’ve added as friends on the app, no one else can follow your travels without your permission.

If you and your friends already use other applications with similar features, such as iOS’ “Find My” app and WhatsApp’s live location sharing function,  you may not need to use this feature on Snap. The point is that Snapchat’s live location sharing isn’t a brand-new or revolutionary function, so whether or not you should use it is a personal choice. But if you and your friends communicate frequently on Snapchat, this may be very useful.

In other news, you can now use Google Maps as a social network.

Photo via Snapchat