Facebook Messenger is following your every location
Facebook Messenger is the most popular app in the iTunes store. Millions of people now use the app on their phones instead of sending text messages. Consequently, millions of people have been letting Facebook track and record their exact locations whenever they chat.
Aran Khanna, an incoming Facebook intern, reveiwed his Facebook Messenger account and was shocked to find out how much exact GPS data the company had been recording without his knowledge:
You may not believe that there are enough of these location tagged messages to provide truly invasive data on any one person, since they must be on mobile, with GPS on, and choose to share their location for it to be sent… right?
What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages.
It’s not just GPS coordinates, it’s very, very specific locational data:
Go ahead and see how many messages in your chats have locations attached. I’m guessing it’s a lot of them. And if this isn’t already starting to get a bit weird, the first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender’s location to less than a meter.
Khanna was able to scrape all this information together with a few lines of coding and mape out the GPS coordinates of everyone he’s been talking to. His finding are pointout how creepy Facebook has become over the last few years. The data would make it easy for a stalker or in fact a serial killer to keep tabs on their potential victims, or predict their next movie. What make’s things worse is that you don’t even need to be someone’s official Facebook friend to gather their GPS location from the Facebook Messenger app:
I found that I could even do this for people who I am not Facebook friends with. I am currently in a large active chat to organize poker games with some fellow students, many of whom I am not Facebook friends with. However, I can still track their locations extremely accurately from the messages they send the group.
Khanna focuses mostly on what a bad person could do with this information, but he seems to ignore the fact that Facebook is tracking millions of people with this information. Most people probably don’t realize they are transmitting their exaction location to Facebook because, Facebook turns this option on automatically.
Khanna updated his post to say that Facebook has notified him to let him know that “they are fixing this issue” – but it is important to point out that this is not an issue but an actual feature that Facebook can use to their own economic advantage.
Facebook Messenger, didn’t come out of nowhere. It was designed by the smartest group of engineers in our generation and you are unknowingly giving away your privacy in order to share smilie emojis with friends.
Source: Gawker
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