Geographic proximity

Instagram’s AMBER Alerts appear in Feed when an alert concerns the user’s area1.

Meta’s recommendation patents also describe proximity through geographic areas rather than a fixed distance45. One Meta patent describes finding pages or other items within several levels of surrounding areas that contain the user’s location, then selecting items partly by their number of connections to people associated with each area4. Another Meta patent describes treating a group as nearby when the group and user belong to the same city, town or county5. For that comparison, Meta’s group-recommendation patent describes using device location, home location or workplace location, subject to the user’s privacy settings in the specified examples5.

For place-search results, Meta’s place-search patent uses geographic proximity to order nearby places2. The Meta patent describes arranging places from physically closest to most distant2. Meta’s patent also describes an approach that gives greater weight both to closer places and to ratings from people connected to the searcher, making physical distance and social connection distinct inputs to the ordering2.

For suggestions without a place search, geographic proximity limits the possible next destinations considered in Meta’s patent on predicting place visits3. In one example, Meta’s patent considers destinations within 20 miles of the person’s current location3. Within that surrounding range, Meta’s patent describes considering places the person previously visited or places visited by someone with shared attributes, such as the same age range3.

Meta’s network-traffic patent describes identifying people who repeatedly share a local network6. Meta’s patent uses that repeated shared-network presence as a basis for suggesting that people connect or interact on a social networking service6.