Want to find out where your friends live?

Use Instagram.

Want to find where someone lives? Visit their photo map. Most of the uploads are coming from home.

If someone has their photo map on, you can often find where they live by zooming into where most of the uploads come from.

You don’t even have to follow them if their Instagram is public.

In a blog post this week, Tommy Collison exposed that those who geotagged a their #tree photos on Instagram were giving away the locations of their homes on photo map.

He’s right. Posting geotagged photos of the inside of a home gives away where that individual lives.

I asked Facebook about it, and they directed me to a help page titled “Can people see where I live from my Photo Map?” The answer is yes, and they “ask that you’re mindful of which photos you add to your Photo Map.”

One solution for Instagram would be to limit the zoom capacity of their photo maps, not allowing zooming to the granular house level.

This doesn’t completely solve the problem, as the JSON response Instagram sends to load the feed contains the exact coordinates for each photo, but at least obscures the address for the average user.