Does your child use Instagram? Do you use Instagram?
Many people are unaware of the real risk of using Instagram and similar apps/social network today. Children get an Instagram account as their friends have it, you may have an Instagram account because you love selfies...but do you know the real risks and what you should do to protect yourself and your children?
Technology gets better every day, more advanced generally means we need to do less or we can do more with ease. The problem comes when you get too lazy and begin uploading a tonne of selfies to your Instagram or even Facebook. They use GPS in your device to find a location of where you are uploading the photo/selfie. You can change this location when uploading, but if you don't, it will take your current location as the default without asking and plot it on to a map, where you can find all of your other photos locations. This is great when you are on holiday or at a concert, you can tag the location of the photo to look back at later on...
What I noticed however, is most people DO NOT add a location, meaning their default location added for the photo is AT THEIR HOME! I looked through various profiles throughout Instagram, especially my close friends to see if this was actually the case As expected, most of their photos are plotted on top of their house...That's no big deal I hear you say...Wrong...
If somebody follows you on Instagram, they can instantly see where your photos are plotted by clicking on the little map pin icon. All they have to do is follow you, its that simple!
Now ask yourself this: If you, your child or even a young family member has hundreds of random followers that you do not know, and one of them followers had the wish to meet them, or worse...stalk them, how easy do you think it would be for them to utilise this and find their home address by seeing where most of the photos are located?
There is a way to prevent this however...
Firstly, lets clean up your existing Instagram!
There are a few quick and simple steps to remove the location tags from your existing photos, or your children's existing photos, I will show you below:
1. Go to the map
Go to your profile on your Instagram app and select the map pin icon, this will take you to the photo location map.
2. Edit the photo's
On the map screen, you will see many of your photo's dotted all over the map if you get around a bit. Most likely you will see many of your photos at your home address, if you zoom in. If you want to remove the location from all or some of the photos, click on the button at the bottom of the screen that looks like a group of squares.
3. Select which photos you want to remove the geo-tags from
Now you should see a screen full of photos that have geo-tags, geo-tags are basically locations attached to the image. Click on the edit button in the top right of the screen.
4. Time to get rid of those locations!
Once you clicked on 'Edit', you will see all of the images have a green tick in the picture. These are images you want to have geo-tags. You can select which ones you want to have tags and also which ones you do not. When you de-select them, they will go grey. My recommendation is to remove all of your tags for privacy. To do this, simply click on the 'Deselect All' button at the bottom of the screen and then click on 'Finished' in the top right of the screen. It will ask you to confirm, just press ok. And all done, now all of your geo-tags/locations have been removed from the photos. Nobody can find you!
In future it may be worth monitoring the map, and also turning off location services for Instagram in your phones settings, it really isn't that beneficial!
I hope this article helps with some of your privacy and make a point of checking your children's Instagram for this...it is too easy for bad people to find children this way! Don't forget to share it!
