Instagram Launches Friend Map in India, Adds Location Sharing Provisions

Instagram is expanding its controversial Friend Map feature to India, while it’s also rolling out some new updates to address concerns about involuntary location sharing in the app.

Instagram first launched its Friend Map feature in the U.S. back in August, which enables users to see where their IG connections are on a map at any given time.

As you can see in these examples, the map feature, available via your Inbox Notes feed, enables you to see where your friends are, and what they’re up to, with a constant track of their location on the map, if they’ve opted into such.

Though that final point evidently wasn’t made clear, which sparked a slew of concerns about location sharing, and how this live location display could facilitate all kinds of stalking-type behavior via the app.

Many users suggested that Instagram had immediately begun showing their location without permission, which Instagram explained was not the case. The feature is opt-in, and switched off by default, though there was seemingly some confusion around previous location-sharing permissions, and posting location-based public stories, which led to many people having their location shown on the map when they may not have wanted it to.

Instagram has since issued various explainers on this, and has now also added some new provisions to cover off on user concerns:

• To help make it clearer if you’re sharing your location on the map, you’ll now see a more prominent, persistent indicator at the top of the map reminding you whether or not you’re sharing location, or if you have your device location off entirely. There is also an indicator under your profile photo in the Notes tray that clarifies if you’re not sharing your location.
• We also heard from people who thought that sharing content with a tagged location meant they were sharing their location on the map. We’ve removed profile photos from showing on top of the content to help clarify that it’s not someone’s location.
• Additionally, we show an educational reminder that when you add a location tag to a story, reel, or post, it will populate on the Map. 
• Lastly, to help reduce confusion around how your location-tagged content appears on the Map, we have added a preview to show you how your content will look on the Map when you add a location to your Instagram content.

So Instagram’s now trying to be more explicit in how the map display works, in order to avoid confusion, and ensure that people don’t feel like they’re inadvertently exposing their location in the app when they don’t want to.

Which should alleviate most of the concerns, and now, Indian users will also be able to see their friends on the Instagram map, which suggests that IG is confident enough that these updates have met all the key concerns, and opened the door for an expanded roll out.

As such, you can also expect the Friend Map to be available in more regions shortly.