Several viral posts are circulating on social media claiming that Instagram shares your exact location with your followers. Instagram denied these allegations
The viral post, which is mostly shared on Instagram, has received hundreds of thousands of likes and comments. The post claims that “if you have an iPhone,” Instagram for iOS shares your exact location with your followers when you tag a location in a post or story.
This, of course, is not at all true. Apple hasn’t made any changes to location sharing on its end, and Instagram has denied the claims.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri also took to Twitter to respond to the viral allegations. “Location services are a device setting on your phone, not a new Instagram feature, and they turn on things like location signals,” Mosseri explained. “We do not share your location with other people.”
What is “exact location”?
The setting was first revealed for iPhone and iOS users in Apple’s annual operating system update, iOS 14, in 2020. It was introduced by Google for Android 12 in 2021.
Although now considered a controversial feature by some, it was hailed when it was first released as a way to improve user privacy on mobile devices, providing an alternative to the general application of location services.
The setting is automatically enabled for app users who have permission to access their location. For applications where precise location is disabled, only an approximate location will be specified and used.
When enabled in an app’s location settings, it gives them permission to determine an exact location using GPS for certain purposes, typically for travel or to collect background data and data.private user. Its use varies from application to application.
For example, while Uber can use it to determine your location when booking a ride, on Snapchat it’s tapped to Snap Map – where users can show their location on a map to other users who’ve given permission to the app or aren’t in a “stealth mode”.
Bottom line: The Instagram Precise Location Tool is nothing new. A post that is widely shared on social media is misleading.
