Instagram is rolling out a new feature in India called Instagram Map, which is heavily inspired by Snapchat's Snap Map. The feature, which was initially introduced in August of this year, is already available in the US and Canada. As it rolls out in India, the company has incorporated new privacy controls.
The Instagram Map allows users to share their last active location with a select group of friends. Users can also disable this sharing at any time. Additionally, they can open the map to see content (posts, Stories, Notes, and Reels) that their friends and favorite creators are posting from interesting or fun locations.
The feature is now available to users in India on both Android and iOS. For those who wish to completely disable the feature, they can simply turn off the location permission for the Instagram app on their smartphone.
Enhanced privacy and user education
The Map feature allows users to deeply customise their sharing settings. They can select specific people to share with, block sharing in certain geographical areas, or turn the feature off completely. For supervised teen accounts, parents are notified when location sharing is enabled and can actively manage the permissions.
Content on the Map remains visible for 24 hours and can be accessed via the DM inbox icon.
Instagram has rolled out the feature in India with several improvements to user education and the product experience since its initial launch:
- Persistent Indicator: To make it clearer if users are sharing their location, a more prominent, persistent indicator now appears at the top of the map, reminding them whether or not location sharing is active, or if their device location is entirely off.
- Notes Tray Indicator: An indicator under the user's profile photo in the Notes tray clarifies if they are not sharing their location.
- Addressing Content Tagging Confusion: Many users mistakenly believed that sharing content with a tagged location meant they were sharing their real-time location on the Map. Instagram has addressed this by removing profile photos from appearing on top of the content, clarifying that the content location is not the person's exact location.
- Educational Reminders and Previews:
- Instagram will show an educational reminder that when users add a location tag to a Story, Reel, or post, that content will populate on the Map.
- To further reduce confusion, Instagram has added a preview feature to show the user exactly how their content will look on the Map when they add a location tag.
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