The popular photo and video sharing app just launched a new feature called snap map and is already raising privacy and safety concerns. Now, what Snap Map uses is it uses something called Actionmoji and it reads the time of day, location and even the speed at which you’re moving. It assumes it’s 7:00 in the morning, With this, you can find out what your friends are up to on the other side of town, but it is as you mentioned, raising some concerns about security and privacy.
Some safety experts are saying that it could be used to bully people and that it could be used to stalk people. It is a feature that you have to opt into if you’re the type of person who maybe blasts through those privacy settings really quickly and just put pushes agree. You might have this on without knowing it or you might forget to turn it off. Now the concern is that for young people who might not know that they had this Snap Map feature enabled it would enable two people to find them unknown to them, or even adults might have it on. You might have it for a particular location. If you forget to turn it off, it shows you exactly where you are at a given moment in real time.
If you want out of it, you can enable something called ghost mode. The good news is that is also only a few clicks away if you’re so technology inclined. What the company wants to achieve is to sell advertising and when they can sell advertising based on your specific location, it’s called targeted advertising, it’s even better than what Facebook and Twitter do. It does it when you make posts on those social media platforms, you have the option of adding a location to it. What they can do is that they can build a better profile of who you are as a person, the places you like to go and therefore they can sell you better advertisement more targeted to you. it’s good for some people maybe not so good for others. They know exactly where you are, but it’s all about big data.
