![]() Louise Barkhuus, currently a visiting professor of computer science at Columbia University who has studied college students who share their location with one another, says that young people are extremely relaxed about digital privacy issues. “Especially in a college setting, you can see when your friends are in a particular dining hall or library and go find them, in a non-creepy way.” “It’s so, so common among basically everyone I know, just for safety reasons but also for fun,” explained 22-year-old Nicki Camberg, who shares her location with 10 friends. It makes sense, then, that sharing location with friends feels mundane in comparison many describe it as simply the next step in digital intimacy after following someone on Instagram. The (arguably invasive) app is the subject of plenty of debate on Reddit, where kids lament the ability of their helicopter parents to know where they are at all times. Young people, meanwhile, have grown up in an era where parents tracking their kids using tools like Life360 is the norm. Many people who remember a time before social media find it distressing that someone could be watching their little bubble on an app, judging the fact that they’re out late at night or, conversely, that they rarely leave their homes. This is pretty much the standard response I get when I ask most people above the age of, say, 30, about why they would or wouldn’t share their location with friends. “We’re no longer just putting up an ‘away message,’ or occasionally ‘checking in’ somewhere on social media, but broadcasting our whereabouts at all times.” “As a non-location sharer, I see it as the natural conclusion of the digital-age expectation that we’re always online, always available, and have no reasonable expectation of a private, offline life,” explains Scott Nover, a tech reporter at Quartz. “It’s so, so common among basically everyone I know” By the time Apple merged the Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps into a single app called “Find My” in 2019, location sharing had become just another type of social networking, despite the fact that for many people, it still feels a little icky. Though apps like Foursquare have been around since the dawn of the smartphone age, mass location sharing was only introduced around 2017, when Google rolled out location sharing on its Maps function and Snapchat launched Snap Map, allowing users to see where their contacts were at any moment. But I’m more interested in the knotty social questions that mass location sharing forces us all to ask of each other and ourselves: How do we decide who to share - and not share - our location with? When does looking at your friends’ bubbles go from cute to creepy? Or, in my case, how weird is it to ask my friend for juicy details on her one-night stand?įriends sharing their real-time locations with each other is a pretty recent facet of modern life. It probably says a lot about me that my first thought was, “Good for her!” and not, “Is she okay?” considering the fact that for many women, the point of location sharing with their friends is to ensure safety - that if they share their location before heading out on a solo trip or a first date, they’ll know that at least one person will know where to find them if the worst happens. She was, I assumed, at a random person’s apartment where, we can go ahead and assume, she’d slept over the night before. It was miles away, in a neighborhood where neither of us knew anyone. But that morning I noticed one of my friends’ bubbles wasn’t where it usually was. I tend to check Find My Friends when I want to see if anyone’s nearby and might be up for a spontaneous hang, or else just to see their little bubbles in some kind of bizarre exercise in virtual closeness. Each week we’ll send you the very best from the Vox Culture team, plus a special internet culture edition by Rebecca Jennings on Wednesdays.
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