It is so disturbingly easy to locate and stalk any of your peers. With only the lift of a finger and two simple steps — opening Snapchat and swiping twice to the right — you can find the precise location of just about any one of your online friends. The popular social media app, Snapchat, contains a well known and highly used locating feature called “Snap Maps” which displays users’ locations whenever they enter the app, visible to all mutual friends, a select few or nobody. In a quick minute, the feature could quickly expose one’s home address, current location and who they’re with. However, when Snap Maps is mentioned, nobody seems to bat an eye.
With the app being a day to day tool in many teens’ lives, using the Snap Maps feature to track mutuals has become extremely normalized, whether it be seeing if your friends are hanging out without you, if you’re going to run into someone you don’t like in public or knowing if someone is active but choosing not to answer you. Through Snap Maps, so many aspects of people’s privacy are violated without a bother.
“The gym I go to has a lot of people from WJ so I always look at Snap Maps to see who I’m going to run into during my workout,” senior Landon Berger said. “It’s not in a weird way though — I just like to know where people are so I can avoid them if I need to.”
Snapchat has become a place where people don’t see any harm in checking their Snap Map and seeing what people are up to. Doing this daily activity seems fun and harmless, yet many decide to constantly swipe over and check where all their friends are at, at all times.
“Snap Maps is very useful and really fun, it’s fun to see where people are and you can find out many things,” junior Eliana Gentry said. “It’s so devious and I love it.”
Having access to all of your friends’ locations at all times triggers an impulse to want to constantly check what your friends are doing, which prevents you from giving them any privacy. Most people don’t see anything wrong with checking up on their friends’ locations. This is because the people who are shown on the map, choose to allow anyone they have added to see where they are.
“I’m for it because it’s helpful to see where my friends are and just see what’s going on around me,” junior Julianna Cabanillas said. “Plus if you really don’t want people to have your location you can turn it off or only let select people see it.”
In some situations, there are people who don’t take into consideration the privacy concerns that can show up from Snap Maps. Snapchat is one of those apps that can help you connect with new people, letting you add anyone and everyone, even if you don’t know them.
“I don’t share my location with a lot of people just because only really my friends and family should have it,” senior Mallory Booth said.
Having your location shared with random people who don’t know you can be a safety hazard. Through using Snap Maps, strangers can have your address and your constant location which can result in putting you in disturbing or dangerous situations with someone. This gives strangers an opportunity to stalk you in real life, which people don’t fully think about when sharing their location with all their snap friends.
Despite the lack of concern in day to day life, things seem to switch up for unserious and playful things, with one prominent example in the WJ community being Senior Assassin. When spring rolls around and the traditional student-led game begins, Snap Maps becomes completely deserted due to players’ concerns of their opponents being able to locate them and get them out. Somehow the potential of being shot with a water gun raises Snapchat users’ cautions, but complete strangers being able to track one another doesn’t — it simply doesn’t make sense.
“Once senior assassin starts I’m 100 percent turning my location off,” senior Ginger Fishberg said. “It’d make it way too easy for whoever has my team as their targets to find me in public and come get me out. I’m not risking it.”
