We all know Facebook Messenger enables users to share their location. Your geographic locations are easy to be tracked by Chrome extension - Marauders Map. Even a stranger can know your exact location and privacy.
Marauders Map, named after the magical map in Harry Potter, was a Chrome extension that helped Facebook users track the exact location of their friends at any given moment, anywhere, anytime. It track a person's geographic location within a meter's accuracy. That's it can track you to a specific room, and your every move, easy to detect your action. It's important to note Facebook changed its geo-location terms shortly after Marauders Map was released.
This extension could track a user's location so accurately is scary. And the fact that you could be tracked by people who are a stranger to you. Facebook is not the only social media platform that has been used to spy on its users. The so-called "anonymous" social media app Whisper shared the location of its users with the Pentagon. FourSquare was found to track its users even when the app was turned off; and Instagram, with its "Name This Location" feature, automatically geotagged photos even if you didn't ask it to.
From the above incidents, we should know that social media companies do very little to protect your privacy. Instead, it's as if they see your private information as just another statistic to share with other companies. It's why smartphones and tablets come with location services enabled by default, why apps automatically geotag your stuff, and why businesses look at a user's geographic location.
You'd better turn your location settings off. A proxy or VPN would be a good solution on online privacy. Once connected to a VPN, all your data is encrypted and indecipherable, so you won't have to worry about passwords and other sensitive information being intercepted.
By hiding your IP address and location, VPNs makes it harder for third party sites and services to charge different prices or display targetted advertising based on location.
Marauders Map, named after the magical map in Harry Potter, was a Chrome extension that helped Facebook users track the exact location of their friends at any given moment, anywhere, anytime. It track a person's geographic location within a meter's accuracy. That's it can track you to a specific room, and your every move, easy to detect your action. It's important to note Facebook changed its geo-location terms shortly after Marauders Map was released.
This extension could track a user's location so accurately is scary. And the fact that you could be tracked by people who are a stranger to you. Facebook is not the only social media platform that has been used to spy on its users. The so-called "anonymous" social media app Whisper shared the location of its users with the Pentagon. FourSquare was found to track its users even when the app was turned off; and Instagram, with its "Name This Location" feature, automatically geotagged photos even if you didn't ask it to.
From the above incidents, we should know that social media companies do very little to protect your privacy. Instead, it's as if they see your private information as just another statistic to share with other companies. It's why smartphones and tablets come with location services enabled by default, why apps automatically geotag your stuff, and why businesses look at a user's geographic location.
You'd better turn your location settings off. A proxy or VPN would be a good solution on online privacy. Once connected to a VPN, all your data is encrypted and indecipherable, so you won't have to worry about passwords and other sensitive information being intercepted.
By hiding your IP address and location, VPNs makes it harder for third party sites and services to charge different prices or display targetted advertising based on location.
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