What is Marauders Map?
Marauders Map is a new Google Chrome extension that enables an individual to trace their friend’s activities and movements on Facebook messenger despite the fact that the Facebook messenger app is itself a tracking tool. You probably know that Facebook has a notorious reputation when it comes to spying on users.
Marauders Map is developed by Aran Khanna, a student developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was clearly inspired by the magical map from Harry Potter together with the very idea of Facebook messenger. You can say that Marauders Map is a tracker tool within a tracker tool in the style of Inception.
Khanna said, “This Chrome Extension was written to accompany my Medium post about the creepy potential of the location data we often inadvertently reveal about ourselves on Facebook Messenger.”
Accordingly, the stalking extension was received with strong disapprovals from the Facebook community and users who are concerned with their privacy on social networks and the internet in general, forcing Khanna to do some changes to Marauders Map.
He posted on its web page: “At Facebook’s request I have again deactivated the *official* version of the extension. Furthermore, Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work. However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default.”
Arna Khanna tested Marauders Map on some of his distant Facebook friends who are regular chatters or at least use Facebook messenger once a day. He discovered that by observing clusters of messages, he was able to accurately track down and locate one of them to his dorm room.
By looking at two weeks of chat data, he managed to work out the Stanford student’s weekly schedule, which means he could predict which building he would leave on campus at a certain time – information that could prove potentially dangerous in the wrong hands.
He wrote that, “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.”
And went on saying that, “the main problem is that every time you open your phone and send a single message it’s so easy to forget about your location data being attached to it. Furthermore, it seems so harmless to attach a location with a single message, but the problem is, over time the information from these messages adds up.”
How to turn off location sharing on Facebook Messenger
If you value your privacy and don’t want to be stalked by anybody, you might consider uninstalling Facebook messenger all together. However, if you can’t ditch the messenger, you can still avoid other users from tracking your location. Follow these simple steps:
For Android users:
1) Go to Settings.
2) Uncheck the “location” box.
For iOS users:
1) Go to Settings.
2) Tap on “Privacy“.
3) Next, tap on “Location Services“.
4) Scroll to “Messenger” and tap to open.
5) Select “Never” to revoke Facebook Messenger’s location-sharing privileges.
