Parents urged to talk to kids about dangers of broadcasting location

By: Ethan Neufeld, Staff Reporter, The Community Press

With new apps teenagers use to communicate, new features are made available frequently. One of these features that has been around for years is location sharing.

On most apps, including Instagram and Snapchat, children and teenagers can share their location to anyone and in a lot of cases, they are even expected to share it with friends, partners, and followers.

Cybertip.ca is an information resource for parents and teens, and maintains a tip line for reporting online sexual exploitation in children.

Cybertip.ca is warning parents and care-givers that their children may be sharing their real-time location with others, making them vulnerable to coercive control, emotional distress, and sextortion threats.

Some young people like to view the whereabouts and monitoring of others through location tracking or constant texting, labeling it as a sign they care about their partners. In reality, a lot of the time it is used as a coercive control tactic.

Partners may coerce teens into sharing their location by accusing them of being unfaithful, secretive, or dishonest if they refuse. It is extremely important to talk to teens about possible red flags and healthy boundaries in relationships.

Sharing their real-time location can create stress in other ways too, such as if a teenagers friend group has their location on, one may see that they are together and possibly feel left out or excluded.

Teenagers may also feel social pressure to appear as busy or popular, even if they want some personal time or simply do not feel like going out and being socially active.

Reports on Cybertip.ca also say that sextortion threats contain a user’s location frequently, as a means to scare someone by making them believe they have access to their community, friends, family, and police department.

As previously mentioned, it is extremely important to talk to your teenagers about who they share they location with. You should make sure that the only people with access to that information is people they know and trust, and never an untrusted person or persons.

Asking if they feel pressured towards different things because of it or if they think it is practical or helpful can be beneficial too, as it can help them realize the importance of knowing who is the right and wrong person to share their location with.

It is possible to use the apps without location sharing, and it’s also possible to choose to share locations with just a small group of friends or family members.

Read this and more in the October 15, 2025 edition of The Community Press

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