Instagram head Adam Mosseri has refuted the claim of a viral post that the social messaging app can track your exact location and share it with other followers, terming that location service is a feature of the phone and not of Instagram, Live Mint reported.
The post making rounds on social media alleges that a new iOS update has permitted Instagram users to find the exact location. It argues that this will provide cyber criminals easier path to stalk users on Instagram.
Reacting to the claim, Mosseri wrote on Twitter, “We don’t share your location with other people.” He altogether denied the allegation of location-tracking and its subsequent sharing with followers.
To further clarify the issue, he shared a thread post by Instagram Comms, which is the official Twitter handle of Instagram’s PR team.
He wrote, “Wanted to share this thread for clarity. Location Services is a device setting on your phone, not a new feature from Instagram, and it powers things like location tags. We don’t share your location with other people.”
{{/usCountry}}He wrote, “Wanted to share this thread for clarity. Location Services is a device setting on your phone, not a new feature from Instagram, and it powers things like location tags. We don’t share your location with other people.”
{{/usCountry}}The thread shared by him mentions that Instagram has noticed a meme going around about how it uses precise location. “To be clear, we don’t share your location with others. Similar to other social media companies, we use precise location for things like location tags and maps features,” the post reads.
It further tells how users can turn off or on the service manually, “People can manage Location Services via their device settings, and tag locations on their posts if they want to share that information.”
This comes amid recent criticism of tech giants for their policy which has the potential of privacy infringement. An Ex-Google engineer, Felix Krause, has implicated Meta of tracking users activities. He pointed out how online activities can be tracked by the iOS app of Instagram and Facebook, which uses the in-app browser to open third party links.
“This allows Instagram to monitor everything happening on external websites, without the consent from the user, nor the website provider,” Krause has said.