Iowa AG Brenna Bird join coalition against Instagram location sharing

Attorney General Brenna Bird, along with a bipartisan coalition of 37 states, is urging Instagram to prioritize user safety and privacy by implementing controls on its new location-sharing feature. The attorneys general have raised significant concerns about the feature, which reveals a user’s precise location on a map, posing public safety and data privacy risks, especially for vulnerable groups such as children and survivors of domestic violence. In a letter to Meta, Instagram’s parent company, the coalition of attorneys general has called for several measures including ensuring minors cannot enable location-sharing features; Sending a clear alert to all adult users explaining the feature, outlining its risks, and providing a comprehensive disclosure of how Instagram intends to use their location data; and Creating a simple, easy-to-access option for users to disable the feature at any time for those adults who have opted in to location sharing.