Attorney General Ellison joins bipartisan call for Instagram to strengthen location-sharing privacy protections

Joins 37 AGs in emphasizing dangers to vulnerable users, including children and survivors of domestic violence

August 14, 2025 (SAINT PAUL) — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced today that he has joined a bipartisan coalition of 37 attorneys general in urging Instagram to make immediate changes to its newly implemented location-sharing feature.

In a letter to Instagram Head Adam Mosseri, Attorney General Ellison and the bipartisan coalition outline serious public-safety and data-privacy concerns about the change, which allows users’ precise locations to be displayed on a map. The coalition emphasized the heightened dangers for vulnerable users, including children and survivors of domestic violence, noting that such tools can be exploited by predators, stalkers, and other malicious actors. 

“It’s astonishing that one of the largest social media platforms on the planet thinks it’s acceptable to let minors constantly broadcast their location to everyone who follows their account. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but the risk of this feature being used to harm children is immense, and something needs to change immediately,” Attorney General Ellison said. “I have joined a broad, bipartisan coalition of attorneys general to call on Instagram to make changes to its new location-sharing feature to protect vulnerable users, including and especially our children. My Office has a long track record of standing up for children, vulnerable people, and all Minnesotans in taking on the harms that social media can cause, and I will keep fighting to ensure that Minnesotans can use social media safely and that the companies that own these platforms are not harming us.”

The letter calls on Instagram to:

• Ensure that minors cannot enable location-sharing features. 
• Send a clear alert to all adult users explaining the feature, outlining its risks, and providing full disclosure of how Instagram will use their location data. 
• Provide a simple, easy-to-access control for adults who choose to opt in to disable location sharing at any time. 

Attorney General Ellison and the coalition stress that Meta and Instagram must prioritize user safety over product novelty, and that implementing these measures will protect user privacy while allowing informed adults to choose whether to share their location. 

Attorney General Ellison’s work in protecting Minnesotans from social-media harms

For many years, Attorney General Ellison’s office has worked to protect Minnesotans, especially children, youth, and other vulnerable people, from the harms of social media. This has included:

• November 2021: Joining a bipartisan, multistate investigation into Instagram’s impact on young people
• March 2022: Joining a bipartisan, multistate investigation into TikTok for providing and promoting its social-media platform to children and young adults while use is associated with physical and mental-health harms.
• March 2022: Joining a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general in asking TikTok and Snapchat to give parents the ability to monitor their children’s social-media usage
• October 2023: Joining a bipartisan coalition of 42 attorneys general in suing Meta for harming youth mental health through its social-media platforms, including alleging that the company knowingly designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and its other social media platforms that purposefully addict children and teens while it assured the public that the platforms were safe and suitable for young users.
• October 2024: Joining a bipartisan coalition of 22 attorneys general in urging a court to enforce its orders that require TikTok to comply with an ongoing multistate consumer protection investigation and to preserve and produce relevant evidence.

In addition, in February 2024, Attorney General Ellison’s office produced the State of Minnesota’s first comprehensive “Report on Emerging Technology and Its Effects on Youth Well-Being,” as mandated by the Legislature in 2023. The report details the harmful effects that emerging technologies, like social-media platforms and artificial intelligence, are having on young people in Minnesota and makes a series of recommendations for policymakers to create a safer and healthier online environment for children and teenagers. In August 2024, the National Conference of State Legislatures honored the report with a Notable Document Award. 

In February 2025, Attorney General Ellison’s Office issued a follow-up report to the 2024 report, expanding on the prior report by delving more into the rapidly changing landscape of tools powered by artificial intelligence and how those tools are being used by and causing harm to children and teenagers.

Joining Attorney General Ellison and the bipartisan coalition in the letter to Instagram are New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who led the coalition, and the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.