The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing
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They can see where I am, down to my address, at any given time.
Why not?
The very real upside is that they casually see me while looking at Google Maps and strike up a conversation or invite me somewhere, something that's happened many times.
The article talks about private and public life... but people will go to all the effort to post the very same things their location reveals on social media. Might as well make it real time.
If you're sharing location data with people who would use it to harass you, that seems like a selection issue, not a systemic issue.
Location data is hardly private. Everyone should share theirs with as many interesting people as possible. If only I had done so back in school.
To avoid some awkward conversations many people would rather avoid, I guess?
"You were nearby? Why didn't you attend blah/come say hi/etc.?"
"You're here? Didn't you say you're going to be out of town?"
"What were you out doing at {time/place}?"
etc.
Great! You tell them honestly, what could possibly go wrong. I'm sure nobody's feelings would be hurt when you tell them you weren't feeling like meeting them.
Now next time you drop by and still don't manage to catch them for whatever reason. Now your prior "candor" becomes a lie -- one that never needed to arise in the first place.
Maybe you enjoy getting yourself into these kinds of situations, but hopefully you can understand why others might not.
It's mostly just 'yooooo I didn't realize you were near X' or 'how was Y? I saw it when checking where my buddy was'
Dunno maybe someone's has been messing with me all these years and I'm oblivious
If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and probably OP).
If you feel these are the only two possibilities, we're definitely very different people.
The heck? Is it that hard for you to imagine these occurring without lying? You have X planned, and now your plans change to Y. Now you owe everyone whose invitation you'd declined an explanation, or they wonder if you're a liar. Or I guess if they're like you, they already assumed you're a liar.
Because sometimes people can be unreasonable. (Bad day, drunk, generally difficult personality, etc.) The more people you add to your circle, the more you are likely to run into this.
Because it’s none of their business. You are not owed my time just because I’m nearby. That’s not a healthy boundary to have. Location sharing encourages “boundary creep” that forces you to more frequently justify and reinforce your personal boundaries, adding friction to the relationship.
You seem to have missed a crucial step in the conversation.
What happened is that the person listing said benefits explicitly asked "Why not?" and so received a response answering their question.
E.g. "it's draining" is... self-explanatory? I'm not sure what else you want to hear on this. Keep throwing draining problems in front of people and they will get tired of it and try to avoid the situation entirely. And if somehow it's not draining for you, surely you can understand your stamina doesn't generalize to that of the entire human population.
"If they're unreasonable then that's their problem" is just a silly strawman. If unreasonable people have a problem with you that can and often will quite easily become your problem...
"If you don't want to justify it then just don't" is basically the same as above.
Etc.
All of this "surely you can see" that you're saying is presumptuous and a strawman. Of course I understand not everyone feels the same as me, should I just shut up because my experience isn't universally transferable? Why aren't you telling the people who find it draining that not everyone finds it draining?
I'd be fine sharing my location with my immediate family, but they refuse it. When they wonder how close I am to being home, it isn't supposed to be such a serious thing as to have my precise GPS location. It's a reason to think about me or message me.
I've come to think that it's one of the many "problems" that many people don't actually want to solve, and being so heavily connected is taking away some of the "magic" of social behavior and replacing it with efficiency.
As a random example, waiting for a date to show up is probably more exciting than having a precise read of their location. Or, when my parents were visiting, they'd often say they were just thinking about how I'd be getting home soon.
The nice thing is that everyone has the ability to decide if they want to share their location or not. But even on social media, I only reveal my current location when I'm somewhere that I'd be open to running into people. Otherwise I intentionally wait till I'm somewhere else before posting about where I was.
You could just copy what delivery companies do: "Only 5 stops before you"
Sounds great!
When you have two young kids, surprises aren’t usually on the table. We need to know when things are happening.
I also like having the feature in case she is in an accident or something.
I could write a book about this, but to sum it up: It lasted about six months. I felt somewhat too watched and I started changing my behavior. Instead of texts like "what are you up to?" she would send texts like "how many drinks have you had?" Or we'd just stop checking in with each other by text, because we could just see where the other one was. It felt weird to ask "where'd you go after work?" when obviously I already knew the answer. At the same time, I also got a bit too obsessed with checking on her. I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities. Sometimes at home, her position would move every minute or two, and sometimes it would just stay stuck. Sometimes it showed her battery level and other times not. I started thinking she was spoofing her location. Then I started thinking she'd convinced me to share locations so that she could spoof hers as an alibi. Once, her location jumped to a residential street a mile away from her apartment and then jumped back ten minutes later. Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my location and driving by to see if her car was at home.
Finally, I showed her the screenshot of the jump and accused her of cheating. Having mostly lost my mind at that point, I went ahead and told her that I'd been spoofing my location and driving by her place.
She swore up and down she'd never cheat on me, she had no idea how to spoof her location, and had no idea what had happened with the jump - her only explanation was that she had been moving her car to park around the corner.
We were pretty much breaking up. I didn't trust her, she was angry that I didn't trust her, and I was angry that she was angry.
We do, however, both have very patient communications with each other. We sat down and talked over the whole thing. She could see why I didn't believe her. I could see why the relationship would not work if I couldn't trust her - and by trusting her, it had to be somewhat blind. That's the definition of trust.
I also realized that, having started sharing locations only a few months into our relationship, I had never developed a sense of real trust for her. We hadn't built that toolkit. Why would we need to? This was like an epiphany. I saw that the trust I needed to work on had been undermined by this technology - and worse, the technology itself was flawed. I came to believe that the jump had, in fact, been a glitch.
I was like - I want to make this work, and the only thing I can think to try now is to turn location sharing off. So we did. And things got a lot better. The last few months have felt like a new, much healthier relationship. Now we call each other, text each other little notes about what we're up to, what we did when we don't see each other. I trust her a lot more than I did before. I have to - there's no choice, other than to break up. One concession we made was to switch on RCS chat, which neither of us usually use, so we could have read receipts. That did more to chill me out than anything.
Anyway, I know this story makes me sound batshit crazy, but all I can say is - maybe location sharing works for some people, but it's not for everyone.
It was good to read the second to last paragraph, the one with the discovery that switching off sharing improved trust.
I hope your relationship continues to improve.
For us it’s just about practicality. We have two kids and are busy with things, sometimes it is just easier to check to see how close she is rather than text and wait for a response (especially if she is driving and I don’t want to distract her!)
As a side note, one other reason I developed such severe distrust along with the location glitches was that occasionally some of my SMS texts simply never went through to her. This led to a situation where I thought she just ignoring them, so I'd just feel kinda shitty and leave her alone, until we finally went through our chat thread together and realized she'd never gotten them.
This is not normal. Why would you want to do this?
> Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my location and driving by to see if her car was at home.
You thought it was more likely that she would have spoofed her location to go cheat on you instead of attributing it to a tech failure, so you starting lying to her and showed up to her place?
I'm surprised she didn't break it off with you because of what you did. I'm glad y'all figured it out but there's a lot of stuff you need to unpack.
Hah. Here's something even nuttier: AI played a role in this as well. I really wanted to attribute it to a tech failure. I spent a sleepless night searching through tech forums and reddit, trying to figure out the likelihood of a location jumping a mile for ten minutes, then back. What I found was not reassuring. Another thing I'd noticed was that when it jumped back, it gave her exact apartment number - whereas normally it said "unnamed road". This also seemed impossible.
Then I fed the sequence of events to Gemini, which told me:
Under the specific conditions you've described, particularly the year-long history of consistently showing "Unnamed Road" and the preceding highly anomalous events (teleportation), it is extremely unlikely, bordering on virtually impossible, that someone's phone would transmit "APT 123" unless it was being spoofed.
Under further questioning, Gemini actually said I was "grasping at straws".
I admit that spoofing my location so I could drive by her apartment was pretty crazy, but I think it may be more common than people believe. There are dozens of questions on Google's community forums trying to ascertain what certain weird location behaviors mean, and tons of reddit threads about whether a partner is spoofing their location. There's a whole industry of private detectives, car GPS trackers, etc.
I just thought it might be useful or interesting to give people a window into what it's like to go down this mental rabbit hole, where these technologies for sharing can actually aggravate a sense of mistrust.
What is or isn't "normal", I don't know. But to me, the most not normal part of this story is that I told her everything, and I decided that the technology had become a barrier to establishing genuine trust. Not even because the technology was broken (which didn't help), but because it was a placebo for the more difficult pill of believing someone.
Trusting your partner? Much better idea.
I'm not going to pretend like I was never a social media sleuth or checking my (at the time, currently no longer) gf's best friends on snapchat to try and figure out who she was talking to more than me or facebook posts, whatever. I had reason to be distrustful/skeptical which, unfortunately, was validated. You bring up a fair point (in reference to a normalcy) in industries around checking in on spouses to see what they're up to at all times to make sure they're being honest. I think this is going to get even worse for people as, anecdotally, it seems more so than ever that folks are leaning toward risk aversion and don't want to be vulnerable, especially when it comes to subjective things or matters of the heart.
Ultimately, I think you hit it on the head, it must come down to building that genuine trust. It can be hard to build if your previous partners cheated on you. However, I'd lean towards trusting if your current partner has shown no signs of deception and seems happy in the relationship. Otherwise it's totally possible to ruin a relationship because one hasn't dealt with the trauma or baggage of the previous one(s).
Then you turn off location sharing after the trip, because you don't actually want to share your location with casual acquaintances all the time. At least, I certainly don't.
In the past we’d always designate a meeting spot if people got separated. These days, location sharing can solve that and no one is ever really lost.
Back when Foursquare was a thing, Brad from Phone Losers of America would do pranks where he calls businesses and has them page someone who had shared their location.
I was thinking of a one person realizing they need some milk, so they see their spouse is at the grocery store already, or on their way home with one on the way. They can make that timely call if it makes sense, and if it doesn’t make sense based on the location, they can add it to the shopping list.
My sister shares her location with me and I will use it to know if it’s a good time to call. On Sunday she goes to church, but I don’t know when. I can check the location and see if she’s in a church or somewhere else, so I’m not calling when she can’t answer. I do the same thing with my dad, I will generally only call if I see he is at home, so I’m not interrupting an event he might be at.
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.
Indeed, such as "don't, tf is wrong with you?" People don't need to know where I am at all times. I don't need to know where anyone is at all times. Stop normalizing this insane practice.
There is no way to prevent cell providers from knowing the location of the device connected to their network. We can regulate the industry from selling that location. I don't necessarily mind allowing law enforcement to learn the location of a device with a proper warrant. Them selling the data to any interested 3rd party should be banned punishable by imprisonment of the the entire C-suite.
Sharing your location with family/friends is not even in the same ballpark as sharing with corporate entities. To conflate the two in your mind just shows how fucked we've allowed ourselves to become. Sharing your location with family/friends through social platforms is also not the same thing as sharing directly through the devices. Again, thinking it is just shows how numb we've become to theSocials
[1] This one is a little uncertain because it relies on tracking bluetooth / wifi radios and you have to do a pretty complex setup. Simply establishing presence is harder (and ofc the whole thing can be blocked by secure operating systems).
Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.
I feel like this kind of information can be found out by just naturally talking with others. Viewing your friend's and family's location all the time is just so unnecessary and overkill. If something is wrong, you simply reach out to others, they don't need to be actively checking your location to determine that. Yeah obviously the exception is crazy emergencies, but I think most people would take their chances than be this open to location sharing. Kids too make sense. Other than that, I don't believe location sharing to this degree should be normalized at all.
It can't be the US or EU, that's for sure.
I commonly leave the phone behind and switch to cheap walkie-talkies to lessen the tracking data I produce without giving up the ability to communicate with people nearby but not adjacent.
There is a huge difference between giving Home Depot permissions to know your location while you are in a Home Depot vs giving Home Depot permissions to know your location 100% of the time.
If I was using a Home Depot app and I wanted the app to know my location, I would share location data using the "Allow While Using App" option instead of the "Always" option. I can't imagine a scenario in which I would want Home Depot to a continuous stream of my location data.
When you're mentally or morally or -whatever term you want- strong, you might miss that some people have things they want to hide that might not be burglary or trespass or murder, but nonetheless they don't want to be broadcast to their social circle.
Maybe we need a term for the Overton window applied to morality (in social terms). If your lifestyle doesn't fit neatly into the thickest part of that window, you might object to always on location sharing but be unable to honestly and openly admit why, leading to people like yourself being puzzled why others might be resistant.
> and how to develop expectations around when people can know things
is that most people will become paranoid when their romantic partner goes "off grid" at 7pm on a Friday, or their spouse on a work trip turns off location on Saturday, or their child goes off grid after school one day.
if humans could trust other humans "going dark" then that would be great, but it seems so far the only way to be able to be offline that is socially acceptable is to be 100% offline/unmapped all the time socially.
The other danger with it is a targeted harassment and stalker.
Both of these are more common then whatever danger corporations represents.
If I share my location with someone, I can’t tell the difference if they’re never looking at it, or if they’re checking it every minute. That’s what makes it creepy for someone to be checking it every minute – the surveilled user doesn’t know.
(Maybe this is already a feature… I’ve never enabled this thing.)
I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.
https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/ https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/
I do not care if they know where I am, I do not care if they have commentary about my location. I guess if they got weird about it I would turn it off but I could not imagine a situation where that would be true.
It's not "dangerous", I am as unbothered by any consequence of my location being known by them as it is possible to be.
It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information. It is also possible to have relationships with people where you actually don't care about each other's business.
This is true, but it’s also possible to not realize your relationship is unhealthy until it’s too late. Trust should be earned, not given, especially with something as sensitive as location data. It should be years into a relationship before you even consider this unless you have proven yourself to be a truly excellent judge of character.
It’s also possible to share your location in ways that aren’t private, allowing intermediaries to get this sensitive information and either sell it or better manipulate you using targeted ads. Location data can be misused in some pretty serious ways, especially if someone wishes you harm, so it’s best to avoid handing it out if you can avoid it.
Why wouldn't I give my mother my location? Because I figure it would trigger a series of invasive or annoying conversations. That's it, that's the worst thing I can imagine, an annoying conversation.
>It’s also possible to share your location in ways that aren’t private
My phone, and Apple already know my location. I'm not changing that whether or not I share my location with people.
* Picked a “friend’s” lock when they weren’t home and looked around the house (I feel like they did more, but that’s all I know)
* Did various petty acts of vandalism to an ex (stealing outdoor plants and decor, throwing glass bottles into the yard, that sort of thing)
* Spray painted the car of someone that they didn’t like
* Smashed an ex’s windshield with a concrete block
And that’s just what I can think of from the top of my head. These days there’s also SWATting and other serious forms of harassment.
Location data isn’t required for this kind of harassment, but it definitely makes it easier to pull off. There are plenty of twisted people who get a kick out of hurting others, often due to petty reasons like jealousy or injured pride. And you may not know what they are capable of until you hear about what they’ve done, after the fact.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t trust anyone, but you should be judicious with your trust. If you had a safe containing $10 million in gold, you probably wouldn’t give the combination to every single one of your friends. Now maybe your 24/7 location data isn’t that valuable, but it’s not worthless. You should consider valuing it more highly.
What kind of police station maintains business hours?
The police station having business hours is normal in my country and several other countries that I know of.
If you have an emergency the police will come of course. The patrolling and emergency response is separate from the business hours of the station.
With that said, I'm reasonably certain even our town has open hours on the weekend...
"Sorry, retrieving property is Sgt SoAndSo's job, come back when he's here, which <checks schedule> is 2-10am Tuesday."
"Is __ on the top of the mountain or waiting in the lift line?" I want my friends to find me, and my friends want to be found by me. It's nice!
And that is why I happily allow my wife and my children to track me at all times.
So they will never feel that kind of pain and despair that a young child once felt.
We're already all carrying a tracking device with us, willingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
The phones (GPS) and cell networks (towers) have your location anyway. The article -- and what the parent comment was talking about -- is social location sharing.
Although citizen tracking is a valid concern, turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable.
At the very least, trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Google has lost my trust, and assumptions of good faith have evaporated.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/14/google-lo...
There's definitely a huge difference between actively sending your location to a third party all the time and passive, often illegal data collection by the cell towers that can be stopped whenever you need by switching off the modem.
And not leaving them in abusive situations?
I'm actually not opposed to direct location sharing among one's loved ones, but I don't think being in terrible situations and praying for your parents to remove you from them is a good argument in favour of location sharing.
"Even"? Historically no such demarcation existed. Often it still doesn't. Compare the commentary at https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/... :
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
I know people who value privacy because they grew up in small towns. Traffic cameras are used for surveillance also. And another reason people don't like them is a record of pairing them with abnormally short yellow lights.
This. I heard an anecdote, which I can't prove but I'm sure has happened dozens of times in various places, about a guy who got a red-light ticket and suspected the yellow light was too short. He went back to that intersection and filmed the yellow lights, proving that they were shorter than the mandated-by-law 3 seconds. (I think state law, I imagine different states and countries might have different minima). He took that recording to court and got not only his ticket thrown out, but (according to the version I heard) all red-light tickets produced at that particular intersection.
(They still might, but their RSS feed has died, so I no longer see their posts.)
Jane Jacobs is not at an extreme position on the scale of how much importance people assign to privacy.
People ditch those small towns for the city to get away from small town busybodies, among other things.
My sister was chronically late when she was younger. She’s worked really hard to be better, but still holds a lot of baggage from our parents giving her a hard time for most of her life. If one of them calls to see how far away she is, she loses it, because it feels like an attack, even if it’s not. Location sharing solves this, as we can see how far out she is without the call.
There's a plugin for OSMand but its based on a modified Telegram client, so...no.
As it is me and my wife share Google Location via maps which mostly fills in cutting out "how far away are you?" messages but it's surprisingly unfeatureful.
What I want is something where I can designate a trusted contact to be able to request an update immediately from my phone or enable live tracking - since sometimes you want to be able to get a moving dot on the map when you know someone else is driving.
Except one time when doing some airsoft-equivalent and it was used to locate me.
There is a harsh power imbalance between the corporations mediating that surveillance and the surveilled, since corporations under capitalism aren't reachable through democratic means. At best they're indirectly, abstractly and highly bureaucratically regulated, but usually by a corrupt parlamentarian neo-noblesse using surveillance techniques to gatekeep and reproduce their power.
Half a century ago this was mainly done through probing the public with polls and the like, as pointed out by Baudrillard in his short work In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Silent_Ma...
Contemporary surveillance is much more invasive, immediate and relies on evermore sophisticated psychometrics and technologies. To willingly participate and submit to this regime is arguably worse than being a slacker, (in)famously studied in a paper by Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti.
http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_perett...