How To Find My Friend Location In Facebook

Once again, warnings are being given that internet users may not realise only how much personal information they are sharing with others online – and this time it's near where you spend your life working, playing and sleeping.

A newly-released tool lets you lot easily track the movements of other Facebook users and plot them on a map, by scooping up the location data they accept shared in Facebook Messenger chats.

Marauder's Map is named later on a magical chart from the Harry Potter novels that shows the location of every person in the grounds of Hogwarts School.

But the new Marauder's Map is real, not fictional.

Initially released past Harvard College information science educatee Aran Khanna every bit a Chrome browser extension, Marauder'south Map makes it child's play for everyone to become a stalker – finding out a contact'southward identify of piece of work, where they live, or favourite bars and hang-outs.

Marauder'south Map scrapes the location data from your Facebook Messenger folio, and plots information technology on a map.

In a blog post, Khanna describes Marauder's Map as having "creepy potential":

"The first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations take more than 5 decimal places of precision, making information technology possible to pinpoint the sender's location to less than a meter."

In 1 example, Khanna describes how he was able to utilize Marauder's Map to decide where a coincidental acquaintance slept at nighttime:

"I am in a pretty active group chat with some of my blood brother's friends (who I am friends with on Facebook but don't know too well). They are all fairly active on the chat, posting one time a day or more."

"Let's choice on the one who goes to Stanford. By only looking at the cluster of messages sent late at night you tin can tell exactly where his dorm is, and in fact approximately where his room is located in that dorm."

Deeper analysis of data collected in this manner begins to describe up a clear picture of people's schedule: where they work, where they drinkable java, where they go the gym, where they slumber…

You lot may not accept fifty-fifty realised that your friends' location information was being shared in the conversations you had via Facebook Messenger, every bit there is no visual sign.

Information technology's merely when you click on their speech chimera that you notice that embedded into the conversation is location information, which reveals where the sender was with creepy accuracy.

I effect is that yous may think it's harmless to attach your location to a single message, but – unless you call up to disable location sharing later on – it's all too easy for an archive of your past locations to build up.

And, as far as I can tell, there is no way to delete the location data from past messages you have sent.

Such creepy collection and examination of location data has clear implications for not just consumers, only as well businesses.

If your visitor is being targeted by criminals, they may endeavour to acquire the schedules of your workers – hoping to launch homo-in-the-middle attacks over unsecured WiFi in coffee shops, or determine the home addresses of senior executives. All they would need to do to begin to collect the data is start an online chat with you, perhaps posing as a potential customer or romantic interest.

The potential for abuse, whether it be past organised criminal gangs targeting an enterprise, or jealous old partners and obsessive stalkers, should be clear. Which means that consumers and businesses alike should consider disabling Facebook Messenger's ability to track and share your location.

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How to disable location sharing on Facebook Messenger
Although it'due south possible to manually deselect location sharing on private letters, it'south clearly all also piece of cake to forget to do that and Facebook's own help page admits that turning off location sharing only works for the current bulletin, and will be re-enabled when y'all start a fresh chat.

Therefore, my advice would be to cease Facebook Messenger from accessing your location entirely.

Instructions for iPhone/iPad users:

1. Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services, where you notice a list of all of your location-enlightened apps.
2. Scroll to "Facebook Messenger", and ensure that its location services are prepare to "Never".
3. While you're at it, review what other iOS apps you're allowing to access your location information. If you lot are uncomfortable with why an app would need your location information, disable the feature. Note that it's probably a good idea *not* to disable location tracking for "Find my iPhone" (if you have information technology enabled) as you might err.. find it hard to find your iPhone!

Instructions for Android users:

Although there have been reports that Google will introduce greater app-specific granularity to its privacy controls in the future, at the moment location privacy settings in the operating organisation are very much an "on or off" affair.

Then, you need to identify your trust in the apps themselves, and use their options when information technology comes to location sharing:

1. Open the Facebook Messenger app
2. Click the settings icon (shaped like a gear) in the upper-right corner.
3. Scroll to "New messages include your location by default" and uncheck it.

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The release of Marauder'southward Map every bit a Chrome extension certainly caused a stir, and saw many people embracing the easy way in which they could proceed track on their Facebook Messenger contacts.

At the time of writing the Chrome extension no longer works properly – its popularity means that it quickly smashed through the API calls limit that its mapping service provided – but programmer Aran Khanna has made the lawmaking available on Github for more technically-minded users to roll their ain version.

Khanna, who starts working every bit an intern at Facebook next calendar month, says that the visitor is working on fixing the issue – although no details have been provided yet as to how information technology will practise this or a timescale equally to when.

My communication? Don't expect. Check that the phones yous ain, or the ones you're responsible for protecting in your business concern, aren't sharing any information which they don't demand to – which includes, of course, their location.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this and other guest author articles are solely those of the correspondent, and do non necessarily reflect those of Tripwire, Inc.

Source: https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/cyber-security/stalk-location-facebook-messenger/

Posted by: mayonsivionts1979.blogspot.com

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