With the emergence and popularity of social networking, people are able to share all sorts of information such as photos and videos with others in various social groups. In this operating model, location information is made shareable among the social groups. The idea is similar to the check-in functionality of Facebook [26], by which Facebook users are able to share his/her current location. When a Facebook user presses the check-in button, the nearby landmarks will show up in a list to be selected by the user. If the user’s current location is not included in the list, he/ she can create a new one by himself/herself. This newly created location information will be saved in the location database of Facebook, which then can be used for other Facebook users. In our proposed social-assisted operating model, indoor locations established (visited and then AP-scanned) by a user can be uploaded to a location database server if the user decided that the location information is safe to be shared with his/her social group. As a consequence, users of the same social group can download the shared location information to their smartphones and use them for future locationing. It should be noted that in this operating model, those locations to be shared require a unified naming scheme. Otherwise, a location name such as ‘‘My office’’ is meaningless for other social members. For simplicity and ease of management, it is feasible to design the user interface that forces the creator of a location to pin-point the location on the Google Maps. Therefore, the GPS coordinates of the location can be saved in the location database, just like the way we handle indoor locations as described in Sect. 3.4. The flow of operation of this operating model is shown in Fig. 12. Assume that User A and User B are of the same social group. User A acquires the Wi-Fi AP information by sensing the beacon frame and then saves this indoor location into the local INDOOR table. When establishing this indoor location, User A decides to make this location shareable, so this indoor location information is uploaded to the remote location database server automatically. User B, as User A’s friend, may check the location database server and find that his/her friend A has established an indoor location. If B is interested in this location information, he/she then can download the indoor location information to be used in his/her location-based reminders.