Track the Movements of Your Facebook Friends With This Creepy Chrome Extension

A coder has created an extension for the Google Chrome browser that can track the location and movement of your Facebook friends. Using location data from the Facebook Messenger mobile app, Marauders Map plots every place that a Facebook user has been (with their phone, that is) onto a map.

The extension’s developer, Aran Khanna, explains the mechanics in a post he wrote on Medium:

“As you may know, when you send a message from the Messenger app there is an option to send your location with it. What I realized was that almost every other message in my chats had a location attached to it, so I decided to have some fun with this data. I wrote a Chrome extension for the Facebook Messenger page (https://www.facebook.com/messages/) that scrapes all this location data and plots it on a map. You can get this extension here and play around with it on your message data.”

For anyone concerned about breach of privacy, Khanna reminds readers that his extension only uses data that Facebook collects anyway, saying:

“What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages.”

While digging through Facebook’s location data, Khanna discovered that the latitude and longitude coordinates stored are within six decimal places of precision, meaning that location of a Facebook user can be determined with a high degree of accuracy.

The Marauders Map Chrome extension can be downloaded here, and anyone who is curious enough to dig through the code, it can be found open-source on GitHub.

Thank you TechSpot for providing us with this information.