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Jun 01, 2015 05:56 AM EDT
Facebook dropped the axe on "Marauder's Map," the Chrome extension that allows millions of Facebook users to see the exact locations of their friends.
Considered as an app for stalkers, "Marauder's Map" is named after the magical map in "Harry Potter" and is able to collect and display the very accurate whereabouts of Facebook users.
Aran Khanna, a Harvard student and an incoming Facebook intern, discovered that the Chrome extension can reveal so much location data, sparking privacy issues among users of the famous social networking sites.
"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 five decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender's location to less than a metre," Khanna said.
According to Khanna, he deactivated the official version of the tool as per Facebook requests while the social media site also deactivated the location sharing from the desktop webpage to stop the extension's operation.
A report also said that some consider the information revealed by the tool as useful but others think that it is plain creepy. The "Marauder's Map" puts people who uses Facebook Messenger at risk since the tool makes their location readily available to other users and even stalkers.
Those who were able to download the Chrome extension gained access to a map that accurately points the current position of their friends and track their daily activities.
Aran Khanna however, clarified that he does not intend to put Facebook under fire for her recent discovery.
"I decided to write this extension, because we are constantly being told how we are losing privacy with the increasing digitization of our lives, however the consequences never seem tangible," Khanna wrote in her post in Medium.
The Chrome extension called "Marauder's Map" that reveals Facebook users' exact locations through a map has been taken down to avoid further privacy issues. The map however, is still available on Github.