When Instagram pushed through a relatively little-hyped, seemingly innocuous update on August 6, there’s very little chance its head honcho thought he’d be fighting a defensive battle on Threads against angry users who claimed the platform had deceived them.
confusion and contention
When you tag a location on Threads, it doesn’t just share the name of the place where the user’s located. It also shares the actual location, and that’s freaking people out. The internet has erupted in the past couple of days since Instagram added a new update that included the Instagram Map.
While tagging a location doesn’t share a person’s live location, as in a real-time tracker of where they are as they move about their day, it hasn’t stopped a storm of anger from people who say Instagram hasn’t done enough outreach to tell them exactly how the new feature works.
Instagram’s August 6 feature announcement reads, “You can opt in to sharing your last active location with friends you choose, and you can turn it off anytime.”
Further down, it elaborates, “If you use location sharing, your location is updated whenever you open the app or return to the app if it’s been running in the background. You can turn off location sharing at any time.”
To do that, you can head into your Instagram app’s DMs, then to the Map feature, and change Location Sharing Services to “No One.” Alternatively, you can disable location sharing in your phone’s settings.
The terminology differs slightly between iOS and Android, but to find Location Services, click your Instagram app, and change the allowed access to ‘Never’.
“Best we can tell, most of what’s happening is people are tagging stories and posts with location, and then when they—or their followers—see those stories and posts on the map, they assume the author is sharing their live location, which is not the case,” wrote Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, in an increasingly contentious Threads, uh, thread.
“We can, and will, make it easier to understand exactly what’s happening.”
The post Why People Are Freaking About Instagram’s New Maps Feature—and How To Turn It Off appeared first on VICE.
