Tina
There is this TikTok* creator that I follow, her name is Tina*. Tina is creating workout videos as well as more personal content where she is telling jokes, talking to her siblings and parents, and some other random funny stuff. Tina is in her early 20s, she is living with her parents and multiple younger siblings. She is posting new content almost every day and she has 70k followers. Her content is definitely at amateur-level (she is just recording videos with her phone, no extensive editing or post-processing, no paid partnerships, she is not making any money there). On the other hand, my feeling is that Tina has clear boundaries on what she wants to share, she does not reveal too much about herself beyond some basic facts about herself and her family. It seems to me that privacy matters to her: she never shows other people accidentally and almost all of her videos are recorded in abstract "could be anywhere" surroundings.
geoguessr
Now, I like to play a game called geoguessr. The game works like this: You get a photo and a google maps world-map. The goal is to guess the right geo-location, the closer you nail it the more points you get. Sometimes I also do this with other photos and content I find online.
Finding Tina's home
I also did it with Tina's account. Yesterday I thought "let's figure out which town she is from". And to my own surprise, 20 minutes later I had first figured out the town, then her primary video recording location and then I was looking at her family home in google street view. All I had needed were hints from three out-of-the-ordinary videos. I was both a bit proud of this achievement as well as a bit creeped out by it, as if I was violating her "private sphere".
Letting her know about it
And today it somehow got me thinking. Should I let her know about this? Point out the three videos that included the hints, so she could remove them? My first impression was: yes, definitely. Because, like any young attractive woman on social media, she also has a majority of older, male followers, and every content she posts immediately receives a load of male-attention comments from nice to cheesy to creepy. And I am reading/watching/listening to too much true crime stories not to suspect a creepy stalker behind every other corner.
But then my second impression was: Maybe the "it was easy to figure out where you live, you should take down those videos" message would have a very negative impact on her. Maybe this message would creep her out, take the fun and light-heartedness out of her content creation. Essentially, that my message would cause harm instead of preventing harm.
---> Conclusion: I want to let her know about it, but in the least-creepy way possible.
Questions
How should I make contact? I think, I'd have the following options to make contact:
- private message on TikTok
- flag the respective videos on TikTok, so that TikTok could remove them (which is unlikely)
- snail mail
Anonymous vs. personal? Would this kind message be more pleasant for her if it came from some abstract anonymous person, or should I introduce myself, reveal some personal information about myself, etc.?
Specific/explicit vs. broad/implicit? Should the message clearly lay out why the content made it easy to figure out her location, maybe going through it step by step? Or should I just talk about the risk in general, maybe just pointing to the relevant content as examples?
What other parameters of the way in which I communicate this to her, could make it better or worse?
Just to clear any doubts up-front: I am male, heterosexual, 12 years older than Tina. I find her lovely and attractive, but I am in a happy long-term relationship with the woman of my life. So I am not having any romantic interest here, nor trying to force myself into Tina's life. I am also living in another country and more than 600m/1000km away.
*details changed to preserve privacy.
