Case Study 02: Snap Map and Location Tracking Anxiety

The Feature That Showed Exactly Where Your Friends Were

Background

In the taxonomy of social media anxiety, location anxiety occupies a distinctive place. Unlike the anxiety produced by performance metrics — follower counts, like totals, streak counters — location anxiety is anchored in physical reality. It is triggered not by abstract numerical comparisons but by the vivid, concrete awareness of where specific people are and what they might be doing there. When Snapchat introduced Snap Map in June 2017, it created a novel instrument for the production of this anxiety: a real-time, interactive map displaying the geographic positions of a user's friends, updated continuously as those friends moved through the world.

The feature was innovative, technically sophisticated, and designed with genuine social value in mind. Evan Spiegel described it as a way to bring friends closer together, to create shared awareness of each other's worlds, and to facilitate spontaneous connection. The vision was appealing: a map that showed you your friend was a few blocks away, enabling an impromptu meetup; a map that showed you your friend was at a concert you both loved, enabling a shared experience across distance.

What researchers observed in practice was more complicated and, for many teenage users, significantly more harmful than this vision suggested. Snap Map did not primarily facilitate connection; it primarily facilitated surveillance. And in the social environment of adolescence — where social inclusion and exclusion are experienced with enormous emotional intensity, and where the knowledge of one's social position relative to peers is never far from consciousness — real-time cartographic visibility of friends' locations proved to be a powerful generator of social pain.

Timeline

June 2017 — Snap Map launches globally. The default setting shares users' locations with all Snapchat friends. Child safety advocates and journalists immediately raise concerns about predatory access to teenagers' locations. Snap responds by pointing to the Ghost Mode option.

July 2017 — Reports emerge of parents and teenagers in the United Kingdom raising alarm about the feature. The NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) calls for Snap to change the default to Ghost Mode. Snap declines.

August 2017 — Independent studies by researchers at UK and US universities begin examining Snap Map's effects on teen social experience. Initial qualitative findings document FOMO intensification and social exclusion visualization as major concerns.

September 2017 — School districts in several US cities send home notices to parents about Snap Map, advising teenagers to enable Ghost Mode. Some schools informally prohibit Snap Map use on school premises.

2018 — Research on Snap Map's psychological effects begins to be published. Studies consistently find negative associations between Snap Map use and self-reported wellbeing, with social exclusion visualization identified as the primary mechanism.

2019 — Snap introduces modifications to Snap Map allowing finer-grained location sharing (approximate location rather than precise location). Critics note that approximate location sharing still provides sufficient information for social exclusion visualization.

2020 — COVID-19 pandemic introduces an unusual natural experiment: with everyone at home, Snap Map's social comparison function becomes less socially relevant. Some researchers hypothesize that this reduction in Snap Map-mediated social exclusion contributed to the reported increase in digital connection during the pandemic.

2021 — Snap Map becomes more prominent in Snapchat's interface as part of a broader redesign. New features allow users to see nearby public Stories pinned to map locations. Teen privacy advocates renew calls for stronger default privacy settings.

2022 — The UK's Age Appropriate Design Code (also known as the Children's Code) places pressure on Snap to adopt more privacy-protective defaults for users under 18. Snap adjusts some defaults for users who self-report as under 18.

2023 — Ongoing research continues to document location anxiety as a specific and distinct category of social media-mediated distress among adolescents.

Analysis: The Mechanics of Location Anxiety

Real-Time Information and the End of Uncertainty

Before Snap Map, the social information that teenagers navigated was characterized by significant uncertainty. A teenager who wondered whether their friends were hanging out without them might check social media and find hints — a photo posted later, a comment suggesting a shared location — but the information was delayed, fragmentary, and deniable. The uncertainty was not comfortable, but it provided a form of psychological protection. Without definitive information, one could always choose the most charitable interpretation.

Snap Map eliminated this protective uncertainty. When a teenager opened the app and saw their friends clustered at a specific address on a Saturday night — an address they recognized as a classmate's house, for an event they had not been invited to — there was no interpretive flexibility. The exclusion was not hinted at or implied; it was displayed cartographically in real time. The certainty of the information amplified its emotional impact in ways that are consistent with research on the distinction between rumination about possible events and direct knowledge of actual ones.

Psychologists studying anticipatory emotion — the emotional experience of thinking about potential future events — have found that direct knowledge of unpleasant realities, while initially more painful than uncertainty, typically produces faster emotional recovery than chronic uncertainty and rumination. But the relevant question for Snap Map is not whether direct knowledge of exclusion produces faster recovery than rumination about possible exclusion. It is whether Snap Map's real-time information provision was creating a new category of social pain — exclusion events that would not otherwise have been visible — in addition to resolving uncertainty about events that would have been discovered eventually anyway.

Evidence from qualitative research suggests that Snap Map was generating net new social pain rather than simply converting uncertain pain into certain pain. Many of the exclusion events that teenagers reported observing on Snap Map were events that they would never have known about otherwise — small, casual gatherings that would not have been documented on social media, spontaneous meetings that would not have been publicly announced. Snap Map made these previously invisible social events visible, transforming what had been private social activity into public social information.

Researchers who conducted qualitative studies on Snap Map use found that teenagers developed sophisticated interpretive frameworks for reading their friends' map movements. A friend seen at one location who then moved to another location could have their trajectory interpreted. A cluster of friends at a single location communicated group activity. A friend's Bitmoji appearing at a location associated with a social event communicated attendance at that event. The map was not merely a display of raw geographic data; it was a rich social text that teenagers read with practiced attention.

This interpretive sophistication extended to the management of one's own location display. Teenagers who enabled location sharing were aware that their movements were visible to their friends, and some described making decisions about their physical movements partly based on what those movements would communicate when displayed on friends' maps. The teenager who was staying home on a Friday night might enable Ghost Mode specifically to avoid communicating the fact of their staying home — not primarily for privacy in any abstract sense, but to avoid the social information that their location would convey.

This reciprocal awareness — of both what others' map positions communicated and what one's own map position communicated — created a complex social performance dimension to physical geography that had no real precedent in pre-Snap Map social life. Physical movement became a form of social communication, mediated by the map, in ways that blended the physical and digital social environments in a particularly novel way.

The Compulsive Checking Pattern

Among the most consistent findings from qualitative research on Snap Map was the documentation of compulsive checking behavior — a pattern of repeated map-opening that persisted even when users recognized it was making them feel worse. This pattern has structural similarities to compulsive social comparison behaviors documented elsewhere in the social media literature, but it had specific intensifying features related to the real-time, personally relevant nature of the data.

Teenagers who described compulsive Snap Map checking shared a common phenomenology: the checking was characterized by ambivalence (simultaneously wanting and not wanting to know what the map would show), by a brief moment of tension before the map loaded, by either relief (friends not visibly gathering without them) or distress (friends visibly gathering without them), and by an almost immediate impulse to check again — because the map was real-time and conditions could change, and because relief was impermanent.

This checking loop has structural similarities to the checking behaviors documented in generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder — not in the sense that Snap Map use caused these conditions, but in the sense that the behavioral pattern shares key features with clinically recognized compulsive behaviors. The behavior was driven by anxious uncertainty rather than genuine anticipation; it produced temporary relief followed by the reinstatement of anxious uncertainty; and it was resistant to conscious inhibition even when users expressed a desire to stop.

Research on behavioral inhibition — the cognitive capacity to suppress an impulse despite recognizing its costs — consistently finds that this capacity is significantly less developed in adolescents than in adults. The prefrontal cortex regions that support behavioral inhibition are among the last brain regions to complete development, typically not reaching adult levels of function until the mid-20s. This developmental reality made teenagers particularly vulnerable to the compulsive checking loop that Snap Map generated: they were more likely than adults to engage in repeated checks, less able to resist the impulse to check even when they knew it would produce distress, and less effective at implementing the self-regulatory strategies that might break the cycle.

The academic literature on social exclusion and ostracism is extensive and sobering. Kipling Williams and his colleagues at Purdue University have spent decades documenting the effects of social exclusion on human psychology, and their findings consistently demonstrate that social exclusion is among the most powerful negative experiences humans can have.

Exclusion produces immediate effects on mood, cognitive function, and self-esteem. The excluded person experiences not just sadness but a constellation of responses that includes lowered sense of belonging, lowered sense of meaningful existence, lowered self-esteem, and lowered sense of control. These effects are not confined to severe exclusion — even trivial exclusion, such as being excluded from a computer game by strangers, produces measurable effects on these dimensions.

Williams' research also documents what he calls the "temporal need threat model" — a description of how people respond to exclusion over time. In the immediate aftermath of exclusion, people enter a reflexive stage characterized by automatic negative affect and motivation to re-establish belonging. If the exclusion is prolonged or repeated, they move into a reflective stage in which they consider whether to pursue belonging with the excluding group, pursue alternative belongings, or adopt psychological distancing from the group.

For teenagers experiencing repeated Snap Map-mediated exclusion events, the temporal model predicts a gradual movement from reflexive distress toward a more reflective consideration of their social position — but this reflection is made more difficult by the fact that the Snap Map is not providing information about a single, discrete exclusion event. It is providing a continuous stream of social information that makes it difficult to definitively establish when an exclusion "event" has ended. The teenager who checks the map on Saturday and sees an exclusion event, then checks again on Sunday to find their friends at home, has not necessarily resolved the exclusion concern — they may simply be gathering data points for the next iteration of the same anxiety.

Location Anxiety and the Broader Digital Surveillance Ecology

Snap Map's contribution to teen location anxiety did not occur in isolation; it was part of a broader digital ecology in which location information had become increasingly visible and salient. Find My Friends (Apple), Google Maps location sharing, Life360, and various carrier-level location tracking applications had, by 2017, created a comprehensive landscape of voluntary and parental location surveillance. Snap Map was distinctive not because it enabled location tracking in principle but because it created a peer-to-peer, social-network-embedded location visibility system specifically within the context of an application used primarily for social communication.

The peer-to-peer character of Snap Map distinguished it from parental tracking applications, where the power relationship was explicit and the surveillance was consensual (at least nominally). On Snap Map, the location visibility was lateral — between peers — and the power dynamics were more complex. The decision to enable or disable location sharing carried social meaning in a way that parental monitoring did not: turning on Ghost Mode could communicate that you were hiding something, while leaving location sharing enabled communicated a willingness to be transparent that could be read as social availability.

This social meaning of location sharing decisions created a soft coercion dynamic similar to the social meaning of other social media choices (following or unfollowing, connecting or disconnecting, posting or not posting). The optimal individual choice — enabling Ghost Mode to protect one's own wellbeing — carried social costs that made it genuinely difficult to make, even for teenagers who recognized the costs of location sharing.

Teen Experiences: Voices from the Field

The qualitative literature on Snap Map is rich with testimony from teenagers about their specific experiences with the feature. Several themes recur across studies conducted in different countries and with different populations.

The unavoidable Friday night. Perhaps the most frequently documented Snap Map experience was the Friday or Saturday night exclusion event — the moment when a teenager at home alone or with family opened the map and saw friends gathered at a social event they had not been invited to. Multiple studies describe this experience in similar terms: a sharp, immediate pain followed by a period of compulsive re-checking and interpretive work (trying to understand why they had not been invited, whether the exclusion was intentional, whether they should say something).

The asymmetry of hiding. Many teenagers described the experience of maintaining Ghost Mode on their own accounts while checking their friends' locations — an asymmetry that many of them recognized as ethically complicated. They did not want to share their own locations but felt entitled to see others'. Some teenagers described guilt about this asymmetry; others rationalized it on the grounds that their friends had chosen to share their locations, while they had chosen not to.

The performative location. Some teenagers described choosing physical locations partly based on what those locations would communicate when displayed on friends' maps. Going to a coffee shop rather than staying home was described by some as preferable partly because the coffee shop communicated social activity and the home communicated its absence. This conscious management of one's map presence is a striking example of digital-physical social performance — the adaptation of physical choices to their digital representations.

The post-event reconstruction. Several researchers documented a behavior they labeled "post-event reconstruction" — using the map's history of a friend's movements to reconstruct the events of an evening after the fact. A friend's Bitmoji moving from one location to another, then to another, then back toward home could be interpreted as an evening's social itinerary. This retrospective map-reading extended the anxiety of exclusion beyond the real-time experience into a forensic analysis of the social activities one had missed.

What This Means for Users

Default settings matter enormously. Snap Map launched with location sharing enabled by default, and the subsequent controversy resulted in Snap providing clearer access to Ghost Mode but not changing the default. Research on default effects in psychology and economics consistently finds that defaults have strong effects on behavior — the majority of users remain on whatever the default setting is, even when they are aware of alternatives. A privacy-protective default for Snap Map would have materially different effects on teen location anxiety than an opt-in privacy setting.

Real-time information raises the stakes of comparison. Social comparison research finds that the emotional impact of social comparison is modulated by the salience and immediacy of the comparison information. Snap Map's real-time, continuously updated information format made social comparison maximally salient and immediate, producing emotional responses of corresponding intensity. Designers who understand this relationship between information format and emotional impact have a responsibility to consider the psychological consequences of providing real-time social information.

Social exclusion is not a minor concern. Design reviews that treat social exclusion visualization as a minor use case rather than a central risk are making a category error. Social exclusion is among the most painful experiences in human psychology, activating the same neural pathways as physical pain. A feature that provides real-time visibility into others' social activities will inevitably be used to observe one's own exclusion from those activities, and the resulting distress will be proportionate to the intensity of exclusion pain generally — which is to say, substantial.

The power asymmetry of information visibility deserves explicit attention. Features that allow users to see information about others while potentially hiding their own information (through Ghost Mode) create asymmetric surveillance relationships that have complex social consequences. Designers should consider the social meaning of these asymmetries and whether the design creates structural incentives for surveillance behavior that users find, in retrospect, harmful.

Location privacy and social privacy are entangled. Snap Map illustrates that location privacy is not merely about physical safety (preventing strangers from knowing your location) but about social privacy (controlling what information your social network has about your activities and social choices). Design frameworks for location sharing features should incorporate social privacy considerations alongside the safety-focused privacy concerns that typically dominate policy discussions.

Discussion Questions

Snap Map launched with location sharing enabled by default. Evaluate this design decision from both a user experience perspective and an ethical perspective. What are the arguments for and against making privacy the default? Who benefits from each default setting?
The case study documents teenagers who chose physical locations partly based on what those locations would communicate on friends' maps. What does this behavior suggest about the boundary between physical and digital social life? Is this a new phenomenon, or does it have precedents in pre-digital social behavior?
The "post-event reconstruction" behavior — using map history to reconstruct what friends did while you were not with them — extends social exclusion anxiety beyond the real-time moment. Is this behavior the user's responsibility to avoid, or does the design bear responsibility for enabling it? How do you assign responsibility between design and user behavior?
Research on adolescent brain development suggests that the prefrontal cortex regions that support behavioral inhibition are not fully developed until the mid-20s. Does this developmental reality create additional ethical obligations for designers of products used primarily by teenagers? How should it affect feature design, default settings, or product approval processes?
Snap Map is presented as a tool for social connection — enabling spontaneous meetups and shared awareness of friends' worlds. The case study documents primarily negative experiences. Is the positive use case real? Under what conditions would Snap Map's social connection value outweigh its social exclusion costs? What design changes might shift the balance?