No, Instagram does not share your location with other Internet users without your knowledge.

Note that Instagram has been sharing your exact location with your followers since a recent update. This is essentially the message shared on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter by several very popular English-speaking accounts, but also by French-language accounts. False information that is not based on any tangible element, but that has spread in recent hours, with messages that sometimes accumulate close to 90,000 “likes”.

No shared GPS position

Presented in different versions, the “warning” refers to the fact that Instagram has access to the user’s precise position, especially on iOS. What is true: Like other social networks, but also some navigation applications such as Waze or Google Maps, Instagram asks the user for the right to locate him. Valuable data to suggest a place (a restaurant, for example) when the Internet user wants to mention it in a photo or video.

But contrary to what is stated, in no case does Instagram -or any other social network- share this GPS position publicly, beyond adding a place decided directly by the user. No instance of a user’s geolocation being broadcast without their knowledge has been reported.

In response to an erroneous post by a woman posing as a specialist on Instagram and followed by nearly 200,000 people, the platform recalled that the location was never shared publicly by the app. A clarification also shared on Twitter.

wrong interpretation

This rumor could be related to a misunderstanding of the arrival of features to, paradoxically, better protect privacy on iOS than on Android, which are still a few months old. Since their inception, both smartphone operating systems have allowed apps to access the (and therefore precise) GPS location of users, for uses like those mentioned above.

To give Internet users more room to manoeuvre, iOS (from 2020) and Android (from 2021) now offer to disable access to “accurate position” in the settings linked to each application, without completely cutting off access to the data of Location.

The applications in question then only have an approximate geographical area where the user is located. Which can often be enough to suggest a list of relevant places to mention in a photo or video.

The various posts that mistakenly evoke an Instagram update prompt Internet users to deactivate the “exact position” option, to offer Instagram only an approximate position. A piece of advice that is therefore far from new, but which may be relevant to all social networks, whose data use is sometimes unclear.