Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Public Service Announcement for regarding Snapchat
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office would like to warn the public about the new Snapchat feature called, “Snap Map”.
For you that don’t know, Snapchat is a popular social media app that allows users to share pictures, videos and messages with friends. Anything that it shared disappears after a set amount of time.
The new feature “Snap Map” connects to the GPS of Snapchat users and shows where the user is to anyone who follows him or her. The user’s location can be identified on a map as a way for users to find their friends. However, there are many users that have ‘friends’ on their Snapchat that they have never met before nor do they know them. As you can imagine this new feature can be dangerous if Predators, who have friended the user on Snapchat, are able to use the feature to track where the user is at in real time.
In order to prevent your location or your children’s location from being displayed to other Snapchat users you can enable “Ghost mode” in the settings.
To get to settings of “Snap Map” pinch the screen when you are in selfie mode to bring up “Snap Map”. Then, click the settings icon in the top right hand corner and set the phone to “ghost mode”. Then Snapchat will stop sharing your location (Screen shots below).