iOS 5 App 'Find My Friends' Raises Privacy Concerns After Man Allegedly Catches Wife Cheating

With the release of iOS 5 last week for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, Apple also announced a new location-based social application, called Find My Friends.

The app, available for free from the AppStore, let's friends with iOS 5 know each other's location, making meeting up in a crowd or tracking a friend's journey to you easy, but it has raised some privacy issues.

Both users must opt in to share their location with each other, but this doesn't stop people with physical access to your phone from installing and opting in to the app -- which runs in the background -- without your knowledge.

Just days after being made available, Find Your Friends has caught out its first victim; as a man reportedly installed the app on his wife's new iPhone 4S, and then proceeded to track her location.

The man was suspicious of his wife having an affair, and his suspicions were apparently confirmed when the location of his wife's iPhone did not match where she had told him she would be.

After catching his wife out, the man posted screenshots along with the story to MacRumors, where users were quick to claim the story to be fake, as the man has newly joined the forum.

The man posted: "Thank you Apple, thank you App Store, thank you all. These beautiful treasure trove of screen shots going to play well when I meet her at the lawyer's office in a few weeks."

At first, Find My Friends sounds like another social networking tool that gets too invasive for most people's comfort - a place Facebook often ends up - but there's more to it than that.

Sharing your location has to be agreed to, and can be set for as little as half an hour; after this time has elapsed a new invitation needs to be sent - and accepted to - before your location can be shared again.

Apple suggests that Find My Friends can be used to meet up at concerts, or check on someone's travel progress without calling them while they're driving.

Google has offered a similar application for Android users for some time. Latitude has a similar opt-in system, but has missed out on the mainstream appeal of Apple applications.