Map to tell your Facebook friend's location

WASHINGTON: You can now easily know the exact location of your Facebook friends, thanks to a new creepy Google chrome extension developed by an Indian-origin researcher.

Aran Khanna, a student developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created the Chrome extension named 'Marauder's Map' that grabs data from Facebook Messenger and rapidly plots your friends' locations on a map.

The extension loads the map in Messenger's Web interface. The data is retrieved from messages sent with location sharing enabled.

The Marauder's Map simply retrieves the latitude and longitude attached to messages from Javascript objects your browser stores to render Messenger, The Next Web reported.

Facebook Messenger for mobile shares location data like this by default. Facebook pushes Messenger users to enable location sharing when they install the app.

In case the users don't want to share their location, they can disable the feature by tweaking the settings of their phone and disabling Messenger's location access altogether. SAR AKJ SAR