Location aware social networking is cool. Everything from finding friends to planning a get together to travelling the world gets easier, more social and more intelligent. You get to see your friends and colleagues dotting real locations in real time on a map on your screen. Everybody shares more, does more, interacts more
and ultimately discovers more.

But at the end of the day, there are things in life you would not want to be discovered, like your exact location through day and night by your in-laws, colleagues and everybody else in your family. A slight slip of mind about setting up privacy and friends groups, and your location information is visible to everyone!!!. And unlike the innocuous status updates that we have begun getting used to, you have little to hide after your location info gets across. Add up these scenarios and an impending social disaster keeps everybody on their toes.

PGI changes all that, not by subtracting any of the cool features of location awareness, but by subtly engineering it into the DNA of face2face so that privacy, user control and information sharing puts nothing at risk on the part of the user. This one application provides unparalleled ease of privacy controls, in addition to keeping user location discrete at all times. And yet face2face manages to provide upbeat social networking features, loaded in one neat application that works on all major platforms.

face2face is an entirely permission-based application. Users have to expressly consent before using the application. face2face does not require separate registration and users are good to go as soon as they log in into their social networks. Users can terminate the use of the application at any time.

Proximity Awareness is the key feature designed to protect user privacy. We understand that the great majority of smartphone users would have qualms about having their location known, even to their closest friends, 24/7. face2face scans the user’s friends network to pick out friends who are nearby. A user can interact with those friends via instant messenger, text messaging or call, right from the application. Such options are geared towards facilitating real face-to-face interaction, by matching up locations and creating opportunities for meet ups or discussions. Friends who are not nearby do not receive any information from your end. However they can still interact with you via IM or wall postings.

Additional privacy controls are intuitive and easy to bring into effect. Users can set their app so that they are visible to very specific friends and networks, and also block certain users completely. Users can also toggle between visibility and invisibility modes effortlessly. Since proximity awareness is only meaningful if reciprocal, blocking someone on your list makes you invisible to that person and vice versa.

Only the most recent location coordinates are maintained by face2face as uniquely identifiable for a particular user. face2face never shares users’ location information or location history with any third party.