A student developer from Cambridge has created a Chrome extension that works similar and also named it Marauder’s Map.The extension that allows you to watch every footstep of your Facebook friends by grabbing location data from Facebook Messenger and rapidly plotting your friends’ locations on a map.
If you remember the magical Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter books that reveal the whereabouts of characters as they roam classrooms and the halls of Hogwarts school.
Facebook usually encourages Messenger users to share their location by enabling location sharing by default when users install iOS or Android app.
About the creepy potential of the location data we often inadvertently reveal about ourselves on Facebook Messenger, due to its defaults of always sharing your location when sending messages from the increasingly popular mobile app.
The code is open source and available on Github here:
https://github.com/arank/marauders-map
This is available on google chrome webstore:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marauders-map/mliofombcghaamgjkmmmmlepkiacdhkh
We all are aware that Facebook shares our location data with our friends, however, what we probably aren’t aware of the accuracy of that data and easiness of extracting that data from the messaging service.
Software developer Aran Khanna’s extension dubbed Marauder’s Map, loads the map in Messenger’s Web interface and fetches the data from messages sent over Facebook Messenger with location sharing enabled.
The extension will able to map your location only for those instances when you have had a conversation with your friends over Messenger with location enabled.
If you don’t want to share your location with your friends and keep your location data private, then you can disable location sharing feature by tapping the arrow icon in your Messenger, or simply go into the settings of your phone and disable Messenger’s location access altogether.
To close the map click the blue bar above the map and it will minimize to a tab in the bottom left which can be clicked to re-open the map.
If you remember the magical Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter books that reveal the whereabouts of characters as they roam classrooms and the halls of Hogwarts school.
Facebook usually encourages Messenger users to share their location by enabling location sharing by default when users install iOS or Android app.
About the creepy potential of the location data we often inadvertently reveal about ourselves on Facebook Messenger, due to its defaults of always sharing your location when sending messages from the increasingly popular mobile app.
The code is open source and available on Github here:
https://github.com/arank/marauders-map
This is available on google chrome webstore:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marauders-map/mliofombcghaamgjkmmmmlepkiacdhkh
We all are aware that Facebook shares our location data with our friends, however, what we probably aren’t aware of the accuracy of that data and easiness of extracting that data from the messaging service.
Software developer Aran Khanna’s extension dubbed Marauder’s Map, loads the map in Messenger’s Web interface and fetches the data from messages sent over Facebook Messenger with location sharing enabled.
The extension will able to map your location only for those instances when you have had a conversation with your friends over Messenger with location enabled.
If you don’t want to share your location with your friends and keep your location data private, then you can disable location sharing feature by tapping the arrow icon in your Messenger, or simply go into the settings of your phone and disable Messenger’s location access altogether.
How Do I Use The Map?
To pull the most recent location data of a Facebook user onto the map you have to be on https://www.facebook.com/messages/ and click on any conversation (indavidual or group) in the list on the left with that user in it.
Any message sent from that user with a location attached is added to the map.Bubbles on the map represent the most recent location for each user, and clicking on a user's bubble brings up all past location points recorded for that user.