AN ONLINE post from a South Lakes woman which warns about the dangers of a new Snapchat update has been seen by 21 million people in less than a week.

The photo and video-sharing app now has a tracker which lets people see the location of their friends - sparking fears it could be used by predators to track down youngsters.

Emma Crowe, from Flookburgh, works at SocialPlus, which promotes safe, in-house Wi-Fi product Horizon to businesses.

So it was natural that she should offer a safety alert about Snapchat’s new update - even though she was unprepared for the staggering internet reaction.

The Facebook post, showing how to disable the function by going into ‘ghost mode’, was immediately seized upon by the online community and shared by millions of people worldwide.

Emma told The Westmorland Gazette: “The response to the post was unbelievable.

“It started going mad from the start and in three hours my mobile phone was flattened by the number of notifications.

“They didn’t stop for three days and you could see the posting being shared across America, and then Australia and then back across into Europe, Germany in particular.

“Initially we kept coming back expecting interest to have died down but then it went past a million and then two million and kept on going!”

At the latest count, the Facebook post had been shared more than 176,000 times with over 30,000 comments, 11,000 likes and total views in excess of 21 million.

Snapchat has stressed that the location feature is 'opt-in', which means that location sharing is switched off by default but can be turned on by the user.

Location sharing only works with people added to your friends list, say Snapchat, and you can set the feature for a group of friends or everyone.

But enabling 'ghost mode' means the user will not share their location and that is what Emma was keen to highlight.

Paul Sykes, MD of Nexus, which installs Horizon Wi-Fi, said: “A big part of Horizon is the focus on keeping businesses safe with their in-house Wi-Fi so it was natural Emma would want to put out an alert on how parents might want to be aware of this latest Snapchat feature.

“But I think the phenomenal response shows a number of things - like how massive social media is these days and how big an issue internet security is.

“When it comes to new technology, it’s so important to make sure you have the proper safeguards and that goes for parents and children, as well as businesses.”