Location safety for middle & high school
Your phone tells people where you are. You get to decide who.
You don’t need to disappear from the internet to protect yourself. You just need to make sure your settings are working for you. A few quick changes can give you more control over who can find you, contact you, and see what you share. Most of it takes under ten minutes.
Nothing on this site is saved, tracked, or sent anywhere. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics.
Reports of someone targeting a child online for sexual purposes were made to NCMEC’s CyberTipline in 2025 — a 158% jump from 2024 (NCMEC).
Reports where an offender actually traveled to meet a child in person in 2025 (NCMEC).
Reports of financial sextortion NCMEC received on an average day in 2025 — up 37% from the year before (NCMEC).
Sextortion victims were threatened during their very first conversation with the person targeting them (DOJ).
The short version
Nobody hacks you. They just read what you already posted.
A jersey. A school parking lot. A story posted while you’re still standing there. That’s usually the whole investigation.
You don’t have to be careless to be findable. Phones share location by default in a dozen small ways, and apps keep renaming the settings that turn it off. The people who misuse that information aren’t doing anything technical — they’re reading public profiles, watching stories, and putting small details together.
The good news is that the same thing works in reverse. Every one of those leaks has an off switch, and closing four or five of them makes the whole puzzle stop working.
Four things worth doing today
If you only have ten minutes:
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Set every account to private.
It’s one toggle per app, and it limits how much strangers can see about you. On Instagram, accounts for people under 18 are already private by default (Instagram Help) — confirm yours actually is.
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Read your live-location list out loud.
Open Snap Map, Find My, Life360, or Google location sharing and look at every name on it. Anyone you wouldn’t text right now should come off the list.
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Close DMs from strangers.
In one study of sextortion reports, 65% of children said someone tried to move them into a private conversation on a different platform (Thorn). If strangers can’t message you, that never starts.
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Turn off location for your camera.
Photos can carry hidden GPS coordinates in their metadata. Big social apps usually strip those coordinates out of the copy other people can download. Files you text, email, or upload directly often keep them (FBI Portland). Turning the setting off in your camera is the only fix that works everywhere.
If something already happened
You are not in trouble, and it is not your fault.
If someone is threatening you over a photo, pressuring you to meet, or already knows where you live, there’s a page for exactly that. It has the numbers to call and the two rules that matter most.