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A new scary app that allows your Instagram followers to track your location has been launched on iOS and Android.
The application, called Who's in Town, takes all the places you've visited and shared online since creating your Instagram profile and tracing them on a map.
The map is updated in real time and users can filter position updates for the last 24 hours, last week or last month.
This gives your subscribers a quick and easy way to see the last place you shared, as well as all the cafes and stores you visit frequently.
Depending on the amount of information you share, they could also be used to determine your place of residence and work and the probable date of your presence at each location.
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"The amount of data is insane," said Wired Erick Barto, the creator of the application.
"It's like you're going through every story and noting every place, consistently, all the time."
The research conducted by Who & # 39; s in Town prior to the launch revealed that 30% of people who post Instagram stories over the weekend are geolocating at least one place.
The application, which costs $ 6.99 per month or $ 69.99 per year for a subscription, has two viewing modes: general and single user.
The general mode shows you a map of all the places visited by all the people you follow, when they said they were there, as well as links to the post or story where they indicated it.
Single-user mode allows you to follow a specific person. The other pins are blurred, leaving only a location history shared by a user.
This could be used by stalkers to track targets or by jealous partners to uncover secret relationships, based on similarities in timing and location of messages.
Companies could also use this information to infer the habits or hidden traits of a person.
Who's in town can extract data from public and private Instagram accounts – as long as the person who logs in to the app is an accepted follower of the private profile.
Instagram users have no way of knowing if any of their subscribers uses the app to collect and aggregate their data, as this does not require their consent.
Fortunately, the application is not really intended for use. It has been developed to illustrate the amount of sensitive data users willingly sharing on public platforms without considering the implications.
"People do not realize what they share," Barto said.
"They are [operating under] the false badumption that this information is only communicated to a few people … but they are public. "
In the end, Barto hopes that the disturbing demonstration of Who's misusing potential in Town will incite Instagram to change the way it stores and allows third parties to access this type of data.
Last year, he developed a similar application, called Chatwatch, which violates privacy. It allowed users to spy on their friends by using the WhatsApp status feature, which indicates that users are online or offline.
After a wave of concern from users, Apple and Google removed Chatwatch from their app stores, as well as from all other apps that retrieved WhatsApp for the same type of user data.
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