Facebook Dumped Intern After He Pointed Out Messenger's Creepy Location Tracking

[Fred Sanders]

1. Yikes! And how much more will be revealed about all mobile location apps in the future?

"You may not believe that there are enough of these location tagged messages to provide truly invasive data on any one person, since they must be on mobile, with GPS on, and choose to share their location for it to be sent… right?

What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages.
It’s not just locational data, it’s very, very specific locational data:

Go ahead and see how many messages in your chats have locations attached. I’m guessing it’s a lot of them. And if this isn’t already starting to get a bit weird, the first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender’s location to less than a meter."