Snap Map is a Snapchat feature that lets you share your location and see your friends.
When Snap Maps first came out, some users were quite upset about the perceived invasion of their privacy, but Snapchat quickly alleviated those concerns by improving its privacy settings. Users can either use Snap Map with privacy settings enabled or bypass the feature altogether and not allow it to run.
One of the biggest questions surrounding this question, of course, is whether you can see when someone is looking at your location on Snap Map. There are plenty of options within Snap Map itself, but it's not entirely clear how to see who checked out where you are. This article will dig deeper into the details surrounding Snap Map privacy.
Snap Map Privacy: The Basics
One of Snapchat's most controversial features when it was released was Snap Map, a feature that lets you share your location with friends and see where your friends are when they open the app. To access Snap Map's privacy settings, simply follow these steps:
- Press the Map symbol at the bottom left of the screen.
- Press the Settings symbol in the upper right corner of the screen.
- You can choose from one of four privacy settings:
- « Ghost Mode (Only Me) »: Only you can see your Snap Map Bitmoji, no matter where you go; you can set this mode to expire after a certain amount of time.
- « My friends ": Quite simple, people you have declared as your friends can see your movements with this setting.
- « My friends, except…”: This setting allows your entire friends list, minus annoying people you don't want to invite to your Snap Map group.
- « Only those friends... »: This setting allows you to choose which friends to share your location with.
These options make it easy to hide your location at all times or decide who can see where you are on their Snap Map.
Does Snapchat notify you when someone checks your location?
The answer to this question is a little more complicated than you might think. Most of the timee, the answer is difficult no.
Since opening the Snap map from the camera screen shows everyone's location on your map, it's hard for Snapchat to actually show who's viewed your location.
When you open the app, your location will automatically update. After about five to six hours after leaving the app unopened, it gets removed from the app.
It is possible to check someone's location on the map through both Snap Map and Snap user profile. If the map isn't appearing for someone on Snapchat, that means either Snap Map is disabled or they haven't used the app in more than six hours.
The travel function
However, Snapchat Is have a feature that displays when someone moves from place to place. To do this, Snapchat uses time and distance to calculate whether they traveled by car or plane.
This travel feature is viewed independently by selecting the travel map at the bottom of the screen, which shows a dotted line from the person's original location to the person's new location.
When you view the trip map, the person whose trip you are following does not receive an alert or is not notified directly. However, on the profile view in Snapchat, if you scroll down, you will see that Snapchat treats your movements as a story. This means you can see who viewed your specific activity on the map. Clicking on the list shows who saw where you went.
So while you can't see everyone who has seen your location on the Snap Map, you can see who watched your recent trips, whether it's hopping from town to town or flying halfway around the world.
Being Sneaky on Snap Map
Here are some techniques you can use to make your Snap Map location appear to be on, but not reveal your actual location. This trick is great if you want to maintain your privacy without appearing to be hiding anything. It's easy to forget that Snapchat (or any other location-based app) doesn't know where you are. It only knows where your phone is.
If you don't have a burner phone but do have a computer, you can install one of the many Android emulators on your device and have it as your Snapchat home base. It will show you safe and sound at home all night as long as you leave the emulator running with Snapchat open. Check out this TechJunkie article on the best Android emulators for Windows 10 to get started.
Another way to trick Snap Map is to play games with your phone's location using the software. Read our articles on how to trick Snapchat location filters and spoof your location in Snapchat for more information on that!
Either option is perfect if you want to bypass the Snap Map location feature without turning on ghost mode.
Snapchat Location FAQ
If I block someone, will they see my location?
When you block another user, they won't be able to see your location. However, some users have reported that after deleting someone, that person is still on their list of people who can see their location. If you don't want anyone checking your location, it's best to remove them from the "Friends except..." list in Snap Maps.
Is Snap Maps safe?
Snap Maps is as safe as the user behind the settings. This statement means it can be incredibly dangerous if you share your location with absolutely anyone and everyone who wants to see it. Sure, you want to show off your Bitmoji and all the cool features that come with it, but sharing it with everyone is incredibly dangerous. If you use the Ghost Mode feature or even share it with just a few trusted people, you should be fine.
How accurate is Snapchat Snap Maps?
There's a lot of debate surrounding the accuracy of Snap Maps, and for good reason. The exact location depends on so many factors that it may be pinpointed one minute and 2-3 miles the next. If you're trying to use Snap Maps to track another person's location (like monitoring a child or friend when they go out on a blind date), it's best to use Life360 or Find My Friends. If someone seems to be anywhere other than where they claim to be, take it with a grain of salt. Snap Maps isn't one hundred percent accurate all the time, and it's not an app designed for location tracking.
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Unfortunately, if privacy is a priority for you, there's no way to tell if someone is checking your location via the controversial Snap Map feature. If you want to protect your commuting and commuting, your option is to either enable ghost mode.
If you don't have insecure friends or don't mind people knowing where you are every time you use Snapchat, then Snap Maps can be a fun feature that enhances Snapchat's social sharing capabilities.
On the other hand, if you have kids, you don't want to be tracked and mapped every time you take a photo; maybe it's not that great.
If this sounds like you, you should be sure to try one of the methods in this article to hide or spoof your location while using Snapchat. Otherwise, your whereabouts are accessible to all your friends!
