SO ANNOYING! I Just Turned Off This Instagram Setting

You probably want to check on it

I love all of you who have grabbed your copies of Everyone is Lying to You (if you haven’t what are you waiting for?) Everyone is talking about it!!!

If you have read it and loved it, please leave a review on the Amazon page. (you can do this even if you didn’t get it from Amazon). Reviews help, even though that is dumb. Believe it or not some people hate that this book pops the influencer bubble and have been leaving some nasty one star reviews.

And keep spreading the word. Tell your friends and strangers and that chick reading the latest Freida McFadden next to you on the beach that EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU IS THE BOOK OF THE SUMMER. And keep sending me all your pics. I love them.

This morning, I started getting a flood of messages from my followers. They weren’t the usual questions about a certain plot twist in Everyone is Lying to You or what podcasts you should listen to on a road trip or whether I think we could write Pedro Pascal in on the next presidential ticket (probably…can’t we do anything now?). These were people who were genuinely worried that I didn’t realize they could currently see EXACTLY where I was when they opened Instagram.

They could see where I was currently floating on my friend’s boat with all our children down the Jersey Shore. Down to the exact dock we were cruising past.

I had absolutely no idea Instagram had just started showing my exact location in real time. I hadn’t turned anything on. I hadn’t changed any settings. Instagram and Meta had opted me in without asking.

It could be happening on your account right now and you might not even realize it.

I love sharing where I am when I’m on book tour. I want readers to be able to find me, to come to events and connect in real life because it is the antidote to the infinite and often miserable scroll of social media. But that should be something I choose to do, not something an app deciding on my behalf because they are launching a new product or an upgrade.

There is no reason any app should enable this kind of tracking by default. It should be a clear opt-in, not a hidden feature buried in your settings.

If you want to check yours go to your messages right now and on the top in your friends’ story section there should be a map. This map is DEFINITELY new. I did not see this as of yesterday.

You can go into the main settings on your phone: SETTINGS - APPS - INSTAGRAM and then turn off precise location sharing.

Or you can click the map and go through the permissions there. This is what it looked like when I turned my general settings off.

Check it for yourself and also for your kids! We all deserve to control what we share and who sees it. Some of us might want this on, but there should be a very explicit email AND alert about how to turn it off. We shouldn’t just have our locations shared without our knowledge. I am usually pretty good about reading the fine print on apps, even though that can often be tricky, but this wasn’t even the case here. Suddenly friend map was just a new feature.

You can still tag locations manually if you want to. The key word here is want.

Happy weekend all! For the record the boat trip with the kids was awesome. Nick waterskied for the first time in about two decades and was a rock star, Bea got to tube with her dad and I got to hang out with one of my dearest girlfriends and her amazing kids.