Chill of finding strangers could spy on my teenage daughter
By TV presenter NADIA SAWALHA who discovered there’s now a popular app that can pinpoint your child’s location down to a street
CAN you imagine if a stranger you’d never met could pinpoint on a map where your child was at any given time? You’d be horrified. That was exactly how I felt when my 14-year-old daughter Maddie showed me a new feature to an app which had automatically downloaded to her phone — and which allowed people I’d never heard of to know her precise location.
Without fanfare — and certainly without the knowledge of parents — this is the latest addition to Snapchat, one of the most popular social media sites for teens.
There are ten million Snapchat users in the uK and nearly a quarter are under 18. You have to be 13 to join and the reason it’s so loved by teenagers is because it lets them record, share and customise silly moments with photos or videos, before each post disappears after an hour.
Since Maddie got the app last year, it’s become the main way she communicates with her friends. As she told me the other day: ‘If you don’t have it, you don’t exist.’
But she didn’t notice when, a few weeks ago, the account of every user, no matter what their age, was updated with Snap Map. The company claim users had to click a consent box before accepting the new GPS mapping feature.
But when Maddie got a notification on her smartphone that there had been an update to the app, there was nothing to distinguish it from the many others she, and every other user, regularly receives.
It was only when a friend told Maddie that everyone could see where she’d been — a small avatar of each user appears on a map detailed enough to show what road you are on — that she realised what the new feature entailed.
Thankfully, my daughter and I have a close relationship.
So she came and told me she’d found out how to put Snap Map on Ghost Mode, which means that although she could still see where some of her friends were, they couldn’t see her. Yet, while I felt incredibly lucky my daughter had told me, the more I thought about it, the more disturbed I felt.
To find out the full implications of the new feature, I asked Maddie to show me how easy it would be track her friends.
Within ten minutes, we’d pinpointed three. One was Charly, the 15-year-old daughter of my Loose Women colleague Kaye Adams. They live in Glasgow. Yet from more than 500 miles from our base in Dorset, we were able to track down Charly to a house in a remote village in Scotland where she was staying with friends.
BeCAuSethey were in mobile contact, Kaye had known roughly where Charly was, but not the exact address. Yet because she was in a village we were able to pinpoint her precise location on Snap Map.
I found it utterly terrifying. After all, these days, young people have a very loose idea of what a ‘friend’ actually is. Maddie, for example, has 80 friends on Snapchat, yet I’ve only met a handful. She knows other girls who have more than 1,000 friends.
Yet how do children this age know whether these ‘friends’ are really who they say they are?
Parents can be vigilant up to a point, but it is very hard to monitor whom your child becomes ‘friends’ with on social media. Indeed, what’s to stop a paedophile from finding a child’s location once they’ve been tricked into accepting him into their Snapchat group as a ‘friend’?
When the NSPCC heard about Snap Map, they pointed to a survey which found that over the past six months, more than a third of young people have accepted a stranger online as a ‘friend’.
Intriguingly, while my first thought was about safety, Maddie spotted another threat entirely. As she rightly pointed out, if there’s an invention which takes advantage of a teen’s innate fear of missing out, this is it.
What parent hasn’t seen their child’s eyes well with tears when they confide they haven’t been invited to party? As a girl who has already experienced bullying, Maddie knows how social networks such as Snapchat can be used to control and exclude.
In the past, Maddie found out that some girls were sharing her pictures on Snapchat and then passing them around with nasty comments about her appearance. Snap Map surely has the potential to encourage the same sort of Mean Girl behaviour.
I’m not the only parent who feels this way.
Wanting to warn other parents that their children needed to switch off this new feature, Maddie and I filmed a clip highlighting the risks for our joint social media channel.
We expected it to get no more than 5,000 views. Within a day, it had gone viral and has since been seen by 28 million people around the world.
We were also flooded with thousands of supportive messages from parents, expressing the same concerns.
One came from a woman whose daughter told a boy she was busy because she didn’t want to meet up with him. When he saw, courtesy of
Snap Map, that she was actually at home, he sent a message, saying: ‘I know you’re in your bedroom listening to music. I’m in your bedroom, too.’
Some contacted us to say how concerned they are that children are growing up with no privacy. Others were also worried that their homes could be broken into when virtual strangers realised their families were on holiday.
ASOne mother commented: ‘I think this could be used by teenage bullies to find out where their victims are and what they are up to.’
And there’s another wider, more insidious, issue at play. Snapchat also recently bought a tech company called Zenly, for a reported £200 million, which was the first to develop location services that allow phone users to see where their friends are, without draining phone batteries.
Such location-sharing features are perfect for advertisers who want to attract customers by sending them marketing messages when they are near shops.
When they know where they are, local businesses may be able to pay to be visible on an app’s map when users are in the vicinity.
Marketers can also use their locations to target young people with notifications about sales to get them through the door. Yet our children don’t seem to have any idea about how their behaviour could be managed.
Common Sense Media, a charity dedicated to informing parents about their children’s social network use, has voiced its concern about consumer privacy for the young, describing new data tracking features as a ‘ big over- reach into teens’ consumer privacy’.
But whatever the agenda, the reality is that for a teenager, such apps play on their basic insecurities. As the first generation of parents trying to help our children navigate social media, our real challenge is how we can possibly be in a position to educate them when it’s our kids who are teaching us how to use it in the first place.
So it’s disingenuous to suggest that it should be left to children to keep themselves safe, or for parents to police these upgrades.
With power also comes responsibility — and social media platforms need to stop treating our children like commodities.
MADDIE, 14, SAYS:
‘ThIS app may be called Snap Map, but Stalk Your Friends is a more accurate name. Snapchat say that when the news of the update popped up on my phone screen, I would have had to opt in — and agree for my avatar to show up on the new Snap Map feature. But actually it was one of my mates who first showed me I was already on it.
All I had to do was pinch on the Snapchat screen to zoom in and there was enough detail for others to work out what road I was on.
I was shocked. For three days, anyone on my friends’ list had been able to track my whereabouts without me even knowing.
Being able to see what other people are doing also strikes me as weird. When I tried it, I could see my pen pal in Florida was at school and another friend was shown asleep in his bedroom.
Unlike Mum, I don’t worry as much about strangers tracking me down, although I have friends who have met up with boys who’ve turned out to be much older than they claimed online.
For me, the real concern is how Snap Map can be used to control other people. What if a boy and a girl have a row or split up after they have shared locations on Snap Map, and one tracks the other down or sees their expartner with someone else?
Snapchat claims it’s safe because only people you’ve added to your Snapchat account can see where you are.
But as a teen, I’d say it’s another distraction we can do without. Life is hectic enough without having our minds constantly interrupted by thoughts such as: ‘What are my friends doing?’ ‘Are they having more fun?’ or worst of all, ‘Why haven’t I been invited?’