Instagram Map lets your friends, and possibly exes, track your every move

Instagram has a new feature to share your precise real-time location with friends. There are many, many reasons you should think twice before enabling it. I’ll show you the settings you need to know.

Starting this week in the U.S., Instagram rolled out a new map view, which you access at the top of the direct-message inbox. The map, confusingly, combines two forms of location sharing: First, it includes locations you have actively tagged in recent Instagram stories or posts. Second, the app nudges you to opt in to a new form of passive location sharing - letting friends see wherever you last opened the app, even just to scroll through it.

Many users have been shocked to see their own locations on the Instagram map that the social network’s head Adam Mosseri posted a “clarification” on Thursday that “your location will only be shared *if* you decide to share it.”

Sharing your real-time whereabouts with friends can sound fun, and is popular among younger users with apps such as Apple’s FindMy or on the Snapchat app’s Snap Map. But relationship and parenting experts warn location sharing can also turn into a stressful or even dangerous form of control.

This is a big privacy shift for Instagram. It’s going from an intentional sharing experience - where you decide when and what to post - to an always-on, background sharing experience. Instagram called the function “a new, lightweight way to connect,” in its launch announcement.

How to stop it

To make sure you’re not on Instagram Map, select “no one” under “Who can see your location” in its settings. Also, don’t actively tag location on your posts, stories and reels. And even better, stop Instagram from collecting location data about you by going to your phone’s settings, selecting privacy, then location, and turning off location for Instagram entirely.

Instagram Map offers some controls: You choose whether to share your location with all friends (defined as followers who you follow back), your “close friends” group or only to specifically selected friends. There are also options to not share location in specific places, with specific people or for a specific period of time.

That’s an awful lot to manage. Unless you actively keep track, you could end up sending your location to exes, professional contacts or even real friends who might feel left out of an activity that doesn’t include them.

Here’s a bit of good news: Instagram says the longest it will hold onto location data you share for the map would be three days. It also tells me it doesn’t use a user’s last active location from the feature to target ads.

How location sharing could go wrong

The biggest risk is broadcasting information you’d never intentionally post about, from a doctor’s visit to a date, says Tracy Chou, the founder of an app called Block Party that helps people clean their social media settings. “This feels like the same playbook they’ve used to get us to overshare in the past - promise that it’s easy to be in control of your sharing, but make it so that in practice you default into oversharing because it’s too tedious to fine-tune both who sees things and what they see,” she says.

Common Sense Media, a child advocacy nonprofit, tells me families should approach both Instagram Map and Snap Map with caution because it brings real safety risks. Location data is sensitive because it reveals patterns about where people go regularly, including their home, school or job.

“When teens share their exact location, they’re potentially telling strangers where they are in real time. This creates opportunities for harassment, stalking, or worse,” says Common Sense senior director Robbie Torney.

Location sharing can also create social pressure around where teens go and who they spend time with. A 2023 research report from Common Sense found that location sharing was viewed by girls as one of the most-negative aspects of social media.

Instagram offers parents some control if they’ve set up a so-called Teen Account. They get a notification if their teen starts sharing their location, can decide whether their teen has access to location sharing - and get to see with whom who their teen is sharing location. (Parents do not, by default, get access to their teen’s location.)

Common Sense recommends families talk about location sharing and turn it off. “If teens want to let specific people know where they are, they can send a direct message rather than broadcasting their location,” says Torney.

That advice applies to adults, too. Surveilling the location of a romantic partner can lead to uncomfortable power dynamics and even the risk of abuse. Research published in May by Australia’s eSafety commissioner found that 19 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds in that country thought it was reasonable to expect to track the location of an intimate partner. It warned this could contribute to manipulation and control.

If you have a good reason to share your location with someone, such as caring for an elder adult or temporarily keeping track of friends you’re vacationing with, there are much better ways to do so than Instagram Map.

The iPhone’s FindMy and Messages app, for example, let you share your location directly, and gives you the option from the start to limit it to just one hour or until the end of the day.

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