Even if you don’t have Snapchat you may have heard news and also concern regarding its newly launched feature called “Snap Map”.

Here’s some information and what you need to know to stay safe —

Snap Map allows users to share their location with each other. Anyone who has chosen their location will appear on the map as an “Actionmoji” — a cartoon avatar that changes to reflect what the user is doing.

By tapping the avatar, users can see the latest additions to that user’s Snapchat Story, chat with them over the map or go to meet them in person.

To get started on Snap Map, pinch to zoom on the Snapchat camera. The first time you open Snap Map you’ll be taken through your privacy settings, so you can decide who you’d like to share your location with. The choices are to share with a select group of friends, all your Snapchat friends or no friends at all — which Snapchat is calls “Ghost Mode”. The only people who can see your Actionmoji on the Snap Map are the people you’ve chosen to share your location with.

When you open up the SnapMap, you may also see some Snaps from people you don’t know. These are snaps that people have made public and added to “Our Story”.

Snaps submitted to “Our Story” are threaded together automatically based on a common theme, so people can see public snaps from a specific location such as a festival. The same goes for newsworthy stories and incidents.

The appearance of your Actionmoji on the Snap Map changes, depending on what Snapchat thinks you’re doing. The app figures this out by looking at things like your location, the time of day, your speed of travel and whether or not your headphones are plugged into your phone. For example, if it thinks you are driving in your car, it will show you in a car driving down a motorway.

Snapchat sees Snap Maps as a way for friends to keep in touch and get together and they also say there’s the greater aspect of seeing what’s going on globally.

This amount of personal information available to the public is raising alarm and concerning parents as a large portion of the apps demographic are teenagers.

If you don’t like the idea of sharing your location with your friends, here’s how to check your settings and/or enable Ghost Mode:
1. Open the Snapchat app and go to the Camera function
2. Pinch to zoom to launch the Snap Map
3. Tap on the settings gear in the top right hand corner
4. Tick the box that says “Enable Ghost Mode”.

Snapchat urges that sharing your location is optional and turned off by default, and users can control who can see their location at any time.

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