Teens share a lot with one another using social media, particularly with Snapchat. Snapchat is a messaging app where users can share pictures, videos, and texts with one another. Nearly 70% of teens use the app. Snapchat offers a lot of features to its users, but one that parents may not understand is the Snap Map. Here is what parents to know before allowing teens to use the Snap Map.
What is the Snap Map?
The Snap Map feature allows users to see where their friends are on an interactive map. If a user has enabled the feature, the Snap Map updates users’ locations in real-time. This means that someone could view a user’s profile and see their most recent location. They would know how long ago the user opened Snapchat on their device. The time displayed on a user’s Snap Map location display in increments of minutes for the first hour after opening the app. After the first hour, the time is displayed in increments of hours until the eight-hour mark. After eight hours the location will disappear until the app is reopened.
How can a teen’s Snap Map information be misused?
There could be harmful or dangerous behaviors that can exploit a teen’s Snap Map location. Teens might be using the Snap Map locations of their friends in an unhealthy manner.
FoMo
When teens exclude other teens from social events, the excluded teens could experience FOMO or the “fear of missing out.” If a teen sees that a large group of their friends are all at the same location at the same time and they weren’t invited to hang out, they could feel insecure or sad about not being invited even if their friends did not mean to hurt their feelings. However, teens could also intentionally display their Snap Map location when hanging out to make other teens that were not invited feel left out.
Monitoring Other Teens’ Locations
Teens can also use this feature to monitor a friend’s or significant other’s location. If done in an unhealthy way, this could lead to negative behaviors and feelings. Teens could be obsessively “checking in” on another person’s location. Teens would do this because the other person isn’t responding to messages and this is upsetting them. Or teens could be paranoid that the other person is doing something they do not approve of.
It is unhealthy for a teen to do monitoring like this when it is motivated by jealousy or anger. Monitored teens could feel pressured to be online and ready to respond to messages at any time. Knowing that a friend or significant other is online can make it difficult for teens to put down their devices. In extreme cases, this could turn into a form of emotional abuse perpetrated by a teen on another.
Strangers Can Determine Users’ Addresses
One of the most concerning ways that Snap Maps could be misused is by strangers. Teens often have “friends” on Snapchat that are not their friends in real life. A teen’s Snapchat friends could range from students that they go to school with but don’t know personally, to people that are “friends of friends” all the way to flat out strangers. It could be dangerous for teens to share any personal information, especially their location, with people that they do not know and trust in real life.
It is very easy for other users to determine where a teen lives if they use Snap Map. If a teen uses Snapchat at home with their Snap Map on other users could determine where they live. Even a passive observer could figure out over a few days that the teen is frequently at that location. Going even further, the Snap Map has street names, landmarks, and the outline of buildings easily visible. You can not see numerated addresses through Snap Map. However, a simple comparison between a user’s Snap Map location and Google Maps would make it easy to determine the exact street number of a user’s location. It could be incredibly dangerous for a stranger to determine a teen’s address or frequent locations.
Should parents be allowing teens to use the Snap Map feature of Snapchat?
Many teens may not be able to understand the risks that come with sharing their location through social media. It is important that parents talk with their teens about the risky behaviors that other Snapchat users may be doing using the Snap Map. Parents should ask their teens why they would want to be sharing their location. Parents should also explain to their teens the negative consequences and behaviors that they could encounter when sharing their location.
If a parent decides that their teen should not be using the Snap Map feature of Snapchat, they should set up privacy settings with their teen on their teen’s account to prohibit the app from accessing their location information. If parents allow their teens to have the app access their location so they can use location-specific filters and stickers, parents can choose to turn off the Snap Map feature.
If parents decide on allowing teens to use the Snap Map, they should have a conversation with their teen about what it means to be sharing their location. Teens should not be sharing their location with strangers or untrustworthy people.
