Snapchat Has A New Map Feature That Should Worry You
First the marketing spin. Snapchat has a new mapping feature. Called Snap Map, it lets users track each other’s movements in real time. Here’s a video of it in action:
Here’s the problem with this feature. When you update Snapchat and get to the Snap Map walkthrough, it mentions sharing your location. But it’s vague on what that exactly means. Thus you may end up enabling this feature and giving all sorts of people access to your location in real time, all the time. Worse yet, a lot of users of Snapchat are under 18, thus you can imagine how horribly sideways this could go with that group of humans.
#Fail.
My advice is to enable “Ghost Mode.” If you’ve already enabled location sharing for Snap Map, tap the settings gear in the top right while viewing the Map, and select Ghost Mode from there. Or just enable it from the get go when you update Snapchat.
You have to wonder what Snapchat was thinking when they came up with this. I suspect that with the potential blowback that this feature will likely generate, they may be rethinking how this feature works right now.
This entry was posted on June 26, 2017 at 8:39 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Snapchat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Snapchat Has A New Map Feature That Should Worry You
First the marketing spin. Snapchat has a new mapping feature. Called Snap Map, it lets users track each other’s movements in real time. Here’s a video of it in action:
Here’s the problem with this feature. When you update Snapchat and get to the Snap Map walkthrough, it mentions sharing your location. But it’s vague on what that exactly means. Thus you may end up enabling this feature and giving all sorts of people access to your location in real time, all the time. Worse yet, a lot of users of Snapchat are under 18, thus you can imagine how horribly sideways this could go with that group of humans.
#Fail.
My advice is to enable “Ghost Mode.” If you’ve already enabled location sharing for Snap Map, tap the settings gear in the top right while viewing the Map, and select Ghost Mode from there. Or just enable it from the get go when you update Snapchat.
You have to wonder what Snapchat was thinking when they came up with this. I suspect that with the potential blowback that this feature will likely generate, they may be rethinking how this feature works right now.
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This entry was posted on June 26, 2017 at 8:39 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Snapchat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.