If Someone You Love Is Going to a Music Festival This Season, Read This First
Do This Now
Festival season is back. The lineups are stacked, the group chats are feral, and somewhere right now, someone you love is packing glitter, a portable charger, and minimal thoughts about digital safety.
We get it. Festivals are supposed to be an escape. But here is the uncomfortable truth from the OSINT side of the industry: a single geotagged story, a screenshotted ticket, or a "just landed!" post can hand a stranger everything they need to find your person in a crowd of 80,000.
We are not here to scare anyone off the dance floor. We are here to make sure everyone gets home with the memories and nothing else.
ProAlign's 6 safety tips for loved ones this festival season
1. Kill the public geotags. Keep the private ones on.
There is a critical difference between broadcasting your location to 2,000 Instagram followers and sharing it with your two best friends. Do the first and you have handed strangers a map. Skip the second and you have cut your safety net.
Before you walk through the gates, turn off geotagging inside social apps like Instagram, TikTok, Snap Maps, and X. No real-time location stickers, no "add location" on stories. Save the tagged posts for after you have left the venue.
Then turn on trusted location sharing with two or three people who are not at the festival, like a parent, a roommate, or a friend back home. Find My, Google Maps location sharing, and Life360 all work. Set it to share for the full weekend. And inside your group chat, share live location with the friends you came with. iMessage and WhatsApp both do this natively, and it is the fastest way to reunite when cell towers get overwhelmed, which they will.
Strangers should not know where you are in real time. The people who would drop everything for you should.
2. Never photograph your ticket. Not even in the group chat.
This is one of the single biggest festival mistakes, and it happens every weekend. People screenshot their tickets into group chats, post excited "we're going!!" stories with the QR code visible in the corner, or text pictures to friends mid-transfer.
Those barcodes get scraped, duplicated, and resold in minutes. Sometimes the scammer scans in before the real ticketholder even reaches the gate. Keep the barcode off camera, always.
3. Pre-plan a "lost phone" protocol.
Phones die. Phones get stolen. Phones get dropped in porta-potties. Agree on a physical meet-up spot and time before you walk through the gates, something specific and unmissable. "The big tree by the north entrance at 10 pm" beats "text me when the set ends" every single time. Old-school works because old-school cannot be hacked, dead-batteried, or knocked off a signal tower.
Write one emergency contact number in Sharpie on the inside of a forearm. Festival veterans have done this for years. There is a reason.
4. Verify the rideshare before you get in, every single time.
The exit of a music festival at 1 am is one of the most documented predator windows in live events. Fake Ubers and Lyfts idle outside the gates, preying on tired, impaired, or distracted attendees who just want to get home. A disturbing amount of festival harm happens here, not inside the venue, but in the parking lot.
The non-negotiable checklist, every time: match the license plate, match the car make and model, match the driver's photo. Then make the driver say your name first, never the other way around. If any of it is off, walk away and re-request.
Turn on Uber's Verify Your Ride feature before you leave home. Once it is on, you receive a unique 4-digit PIN when you request a ride. You give that PIN to your driver, and the trip cannot start until they enter it correctly in their app. It takes 30 seconds to enable and closes one of the biggest loopholes in rideshare safety. Lyft offers similar in-app verification, so check that your ride details match before you ever open a door.
5. Trust the gut. Verify the stranger. Use a code word.
If someone new at the festival seems to know suspiciously specific things about you, like your name, your job, where you are staying, or who you came with, that is not charm. That is reconnaissance. People who do harm at festivals almost always do their homework first, and the information is almost always pulled from public social media.
Have a code word with your group that means "come get me, now, no questions." Something you would never say in casual conversation. A fruit. A weather pattern. Whatever it is, the code word is not paranoid. It is the single cheapest insurance policy in live event safety.
6. Set up Medical ID on the lock screen before you leave home.
This is the 60-second setup that could save someone's life, and almost nobody does it. Apple's Medical ID (Health app, then your profile picture, then Medical ID, then "Show When Locked") lets first responders access allergies, medications, conditions, and emergency contacts directly from the lock screen, no passcode required. Android has equivalent features built into most manufacturers' safety apps.
In a dehydration, overdose, or injury scenario, and those happen at every major event, this is the difference between a two-minute response and a thirty-minute guessing game. It is the highest-leverage item on this entire list. Do it tonight.
What to do if something feels off
Find festival security or a medical tent. They are trained for this, and they are closer than you think. Share your live location with one trusted person. And remember: you can always leave. No set is worth staying for.
ProAlign helps people and organizations understand their exposure before someone else does. For more security and safety guidance, get in touch.