Folarin Kehinde

For those who are not aware, social media applications and your phone hardware can be used to monitor your activities and track your location.

Tracking location is something your phone does all the time, and your social media applications harvest that information for malicious reasons.

These activities can pose a serious threat to your privacy and your physical safety.

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATIONS TRACK YOU

Your mobile device’s hardware and its operating system work together to monitor your location.  The primary location tool is your GPS chipset, of course.  If you can see the sky from where you are, your phone can determine your location to within a yard or two.

That only works when you’re outdoors and aboveground, so your devices have other tricks they can use for location-finding.  One is by monitoring which cellular towers your phone “pings” as you go about your business. 

Another checks the Wi-Fi networks your phone finds along the way: those locations (IP addresses) can be looked up and used to define your location in something pretty close to real-time.

Your device (and your social media app) can even use subtler cues, like your phone’s accelerometer (to tell when you’re in motion) and altimeter (to monitor how far up you’ve gone) to place you accurately on a specific floor of a given building. 

When you have all of those things enabled, your devices can potentially pinpoint you within a given room.

DISADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA TRACKING

The disadvantages of Social Media location tracking are enormous. Though no list may be comprehensive enough to outline all the disadvantages of Social Media tracking, a few of the most obvious include:

1. The possibility of stalking and harassment.  This is the flip side of protecting yourself through location tracking: it allows stalkers, vindictive exes and pretty much anyone else to find you as well if you share your location.  It’s especially concerning for those in abusive or controlling relationships.
2. It gives scammers a lot of additional leverage.  Phone scammers often “spoof” caller ID to show a number that’s local to you, or even your own number, which you’re more likely to answer.  It also gives them the info they need for plausible stories to con you with (“My kids go to Acme Elementary as well …”). 
3. Aside from that, keeping location services turned on lets them match up your name to your address (anyone can do that) to target you personally, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all scam.
4. When you check in from a popular vacation spot, you’re telling any burglars in your area that your home is empty, and ready to be looted.  That doesn’t make for a happy homecoming.
   

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM SOCIAL MEDIA TRACKING

Keeping location services on, or turning them off, comes down to deciding whether the benefits outweigh your potential exposure to harm.  If you decide you’d rather opt out, you’ll need to change those settings.  For your convenience, here’s a quick guide to doing that.

Android 9 and Previous Versions

On a phone running any version of Android up to and including Android 9, tap the Settings icon, then Connections, and finally Location to turn location services on and off (there may be some slight differences between different phones and versions of Android).  This turns off location services for all apps, so you’ll need to turn it back on again to use GPS navigation or other location-centric apps.

Android 10 and Newer Versions

Newer versions of Android let you control permissions on an app-by-app basis, which is much more practical.  Tap Settings, then Apps & Notifications and See All Apps.  Scroll down the list and tap each of your social media apps, then find and turn off location services for each of them.  Alternatively, you can set it to ask every time before using location services or to only allow it while the app is active, but those options aren’t helpful if you always have the app open.

iOS and iPad OS

On an Apple device, tap Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services.  You can turn off Location Services entirely using the toggle at the top of your screen, or leave them on for the phone as a whole but turn them off for specific apps.  Scroll down to your social media apps, tap them one after the other and choose whether or when each app can use location services.

On a given social media platform, you may need to tweak other settings as well to maximize your privacy.  A few examples include:

Facebook

Facebook has already dropped several location-driven services from its platform, including Nearby Friends, Background Location and Location History.  Location History will be viewable until August 2022, but if you want to delete it now you can find it in your Profile Settings. You may also want to turn off the “Background Location” setting (Android app only), which lets Facebook track your location even when you aren’t using the app.  Bear in mind that even with Location Services turned off, Facebook will still use tools like your IP address or Wi-Fi connection to guess your location.

Instagram

Unlike Facebook, Instagram’s default is to not use location settings.  Turning them off on your phone is all you need to do, but you can manually add a location (if you want to) when uploading a photo.

Twitter

Twitter makes little use of your location, but there is one setting you might want to look at.  Tap Settings, then Privacy and Safety, and then Location Information.  You’ll see an option labeled “Add location information to your Tweets.”  If that’s turned on, you can turn it off for more privacy.  You also have the option of removing all location information attached to your tweets, if that setting has been turned on until now.