A Harvard student who created an app allowing users to see the location of their Facebook friends to within a metre says he did it to prove a point; we’re sharing a shocking amount of data online.
The extension, Marauders Map, pulls in data that is sent out by default every time someone sends a message on Facebook Messenger.
It only works if your friends have Facebook Messenger and have neglected to change their privacy settings which – by default – share your location.
But it’s not just the city you’re in. Harvard student Aran Khanna wrote in a post on Medium that Facebook uses longitude and latitude coordinates to five decimal places which, he says, can accurately place a person to within a metre of their location.
The data also includes timestamps which means the app can (if a person is constantly using Facebook Messenger) track a person’s location throughout the day.
Khanna showed as much in his Medium post as he accurately tracked his friends’ movements over a week.
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“Furthermore, by gathering a couple weeks’ worth of chat data on the map and looking at the location clusters you can even figure out his weekly schedule,” he wrote. “With this you can predict exactly which building he would be in at a given time.”
Khanna declined to speak with Global News about this story.
While Facebook pulls in the data by default, don’t expect the extension to work for much longer. The app does contravene Facebook policy and it has asked Khanna to remove it.
The company defended its policy to track locations in a statement saying “people share their location to better connect with their friends on Messenger.”
“We’ve been listening to people’s feedback and for the last few months have been working hard to improve this experience. We will be rolling out improvements very soon. In the meantime, people can still choose to turn off location sharing at any time by tapping the blue arrow in the message composer.”
Facebook has been proactive in helping users understand its privacy policy in the past, pushing out a pop-up message asking users to spend time reviewing their privacy settings.
How to turn off Facebook Messenger’s location tracking
If your location services are turned on, you can easily turn them off from within the Facebook Messenger app itself. When in a chat window, you’ll see an icon at the top of the keyboard (circled in red below). Simply click on that to turn it off and on.
If using an iPhone, you can also click on Settings, then scroll down to Privacy.
From there, click on Location Services and find Messenger from the list of apps below.
After clicking on Messenger, you’ll see two options; Never or While Using the App. Pick one.
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