I share my realtime Google Maps location with 30 people, friends, family, people from the internet.
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.
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.
"Your date's previous date is running long. Please wait awkwardly at the restaurant at the table by yourself while everyone rolls the dice on whether you got stood up or not."
I do the same thing, just smaller group. Answering the questions you’re asking just requires candor: I need some me time. I wasn’t feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
> just requires candor: I need some me time. I wasn’t feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
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.
The obvious one being your wife noticing you're at your mistress' house when you told her you were over at your girlfriend's, but outside of that, the problem the people that are positive about sharing their location is that it's also being abused by the abusive. That's a social problem, and not something technology can solve. I share my location with people I love and trust and will understand that I was busy and had an itinerary I needed to stick to and couldn't see them even though I was right next door, and if they ask we'll have a conversation about it that isn't awkward. Good for me but the problem isn't that I have good people in my life that I share this with, but that other people have bad people in their lives that they're forced to share it with, for whatever reason. I don't have an answer for that.
If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your location with that person.
If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and probably OP).
> If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your location with that person. 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.
These seems to be about guilting and pressuring rather then lying. That person does not have issue because they lie, they have issue because others feel entitled to pressure them.
> Maybe if you don’t lie to people you wouldn’t have that issue?
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 having to keep track of who might have noticed you on the map—then explaining your choices to them—is draining and makes you feel like you can’t make a basic personal choice without justifying it.
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.
Then just don't? If it's none of their business then it's none of their business, if they're unreasonable then that's their problem, if you don't want to justify it then just don't?
Or just don’t share your location and sidestep the whole problem? It’s not like you won’t be invited to a party because you don’t share your location 24/7. (If this is somehow actually the case then you need new friends.)
Well that's just going in circles. The question was "Why would you share?" and someone gave their list of perceived benefits. These were written off on the basis of creating a responsibility of explaining yourself to everyone. I was only responding to that assertion. But you're right, we could just not have this conversation at all...
> The question was "Why would you share?" and someone gave their list of perceived benefits. These were written off on the basis of creating a responsibility of explaining yourself to everyone.
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.
Nope, I was responding to one of the Why Not? rationales. What I said just now was in response to a complete sidestep of the issue, which is something else and honestly quite frustrating.
You got direct answers to your question, nobody is going circles or avoiding your question. If anything your responses seem confused.
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.
I'm not asking to hear anything more and I'm quite astonished that you feel the need to continue this. I read a point, and I made my counter-point and the response was "well you could just not bother." Why are we still bothering to talk about any of it?
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?
Yeah but can't you just post an announce "i'll be in X for Y days" on SNS like the old way ? It's way nicer and a much more explicit invitation for hangout than an icon on on map ;)
I suspect that they are trying to recreate the experience of bumping into someone they know. Since the destruction of third-spaces, it is increasingly unlikely that you'll serendipitously interact with someone in an unplanned, but welcome, social environment. Leaving your location on for friends and family in this way signals something close to "If you see me, say hi". Whereas announcing "I will be at X for Y time" is a bit more heavy handed. And just knowing that isn't sufficient to actually act on the information, you still have to reach out and plan something unless you are an granular as the actual building you are in, which feels weird. It feels a little intrusive to constantly be announcing my location. Like "Hey! Hey! obk0943t! I'm gonna be in NYC just so you know!" If I just left my location on, then /if/ you care, you can find out. But if you don't, you are not interrupted with the information. Finally, posting leaves a record, whereas location sharing is always "right now". Sure, someone can use that to construct a timeline, but that takes effort on their part (and possibly malice).
Modern lives may or may not be more spontaneous (doubtful), but not everyone has the same capacity for planning as you do. Sometimes I'll randomly find myself 30 miles from home on an spontaneous side mission, and would love to drop in on friends I don't usually see, if they're around.
I don't think I even have 30 different people in my contacts list who I've talked to more than once in the past month, let alone that many living close enough to me to casually invite me somewhere because I'm nearby.
My only location sharing is with my wife. It is very useful to check things like how far away she is before getting home so I can start dinner, or seeing if she has left the house yet or can I still text her to ask for her to do something at home.
My location sharing with my partner is a Signal message. “On my way home!” Works great, hasn’t failed yet. And I can still make it a surprise, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?
We often send those, but sometimes we are busy or traffic is worse than normal. I don’t want to text to ask where she is, because she might be driving and I don’t want to distract her.
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.
My location sharing with my partner is a sudden appearance. "Hello, I'm here!" Works great, hasn't failed yet. And I can still just not show up, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?
About a year ago, I started sharing location with my girlfriend. In general I hated the idea and I'd sworn I'd never do it in previous relationships. But she lives about 20 minutes away, and she convinced me it would be nice for the reasons you outlined.
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.
Read receipts are just as much of a social anxiety trigger for me; “oh they read my message, why haven’t they responded” or “they read my last few messages, why didn’t they read this one, am I boring them”. I turned those off entirely. Sometimes new acquaintances ask me why. I tell them it stresses me out and makes me overthink social interactions. Most people are amenable to this explanation.
Yeah, for me as well. Although for me, it's not because I wonder why someone hasn't responded... it's because often I'm in the middle of something and don't feel like responding right away, and I get overly concerned that the other person will think I'm being rude! So I don't use RCS with anyone besides my girlfriend. But there's an implicit agreement in it that we try to get back to each other fairly quickly. Neither of us wants the other to think we're up to something sketchy. This helped ease me into our new non-tracking reality.
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.
Same here. On my WhatsApp, read receipts and online status are off, and have been since I first found the feature. The way "they left me on read" has found its way into common English is disturbing.
This makes sense. My wife and I didn’t start sharing our locations until we had already developed complete trust in each other. It has never caused us any issues, because we don’t have doubts about our trust.
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!)
Thank you for sharing your story! Yeah, it's not for everybody. If I was an obsessive teenager when this technology existed I'd be pterodactyl-shit crazy. I'm able to interact with it in a mostly healthy way these days, after a lot of therapy and medication that has to do with me maturing as a person and nothing to do with the technology itself. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd grown up with this technology.
> I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities.
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.
Yeah I think my response was a bit harsher than I intended so sorry about that. I appreciate you responding
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).
Android's developer mode has an option to "Set mock location app" so that you can test an app you're building that relies on location data. Various spoofing apps take advantage of this. On iOS, I don't know.
Best use for location sharing I can think of is traveling in a convoy of more than one vehicle, when you plan to meet up for lunch somewhere along the way. At least one person in each car shares their location with each other during the trip, so you can tell that car B is 20 minutes away from the restaurant while car A is 30 minutes away, so car B can afford to stop for a bathroom break.
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.
It’s actually a good use case. However what we usually do is decide where to meet/stop and we wait for others to reach and until everyone arrives we relax, joke around, munch on something or so. If someone is getting too late then we call and check and if they’re fine and are just getting late then we weigh on making fun of them and pulling their legs and sometimes actually do that. Stuff like that.
Location sharing is creepy. It's weird how many people track their partner's movement.
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 share my location with 10+ people, including my partner. My wife and participating friends all know, trust and love each other and none of us care if we know where each other are, but at times where we are coordinating a plan on the fly FindMy has been incredibly useful. If I’m letting weather apps and etc know and sell my location to data brokers, letting my inner circle see my location isn’t that deep.
I suppose it depends on the context. For some couples there has been some past dishonesty, and the location sharing can serve as a measure of accountability. That doesn’t mean it’s always monitored (though I’ve definitely seen some people obsess over this to an unhealthy degree), but it helps the one who was offended feel more secure and keeps the one who did the offending honest.
When you said it depends on context, I thought you’d give a positive context. Using as a means to try and restore broken trust doesn’t sound very positive. Plus, if the dishonest one knows the cell phone is being tracked, they can work around that.
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.
I have been eagerly sharing my location with as many people as possible for years. I have not been very discerning about it - and in fact if anyone in this thread wants my location feel free to message me on signal (drex.64) and I'll share on google maps. No need to share back (though I don't mind)!
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.
> There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing
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.
That's certainly one of the options! However I generally disagree with your point of view. You are welcome to hold to it, but many people already know where you are at all times and I suspect if you ask your community they will have little reflection on what level of sharing feels appropriate. I personally do not want to put the genie all the way back into the bottle.
I've never once allowed a company like Home Depot to know my location with Location Sharing. If their site needs to know what store is "my store", then I use zip code searching and manually setting the store.
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
The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The cell phone companies (approximately but they can triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.
[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).
Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for something the authorities would not agree with, I most certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.
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.
> 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.
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.
Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
> I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in.
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.
To speak bluntly, I'm not sure you're considering that many people want to hide or to be able to hide activities like adultery, gambling, prostitution, unhealthy food, spending too much time in bars, leaving their wife and kids at home to just go park and sit in a parking lot to get away, etc.
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.
I know! I am not sure you are considering that at the moment full sharing is the default and, in many cases, not optional. It seems like you're under the impression that I want us to share location all of the time when I've just said that's too much. It's just the option we have at the moment. We need to figure out when and how to share location and how to develop expectations around when people can know things.
> 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.
If you're correct then there's no hope. People will realize they can have the data and will take refusal to provide it as a proxy for misbehavior. For some that time is already here. If we can build alternatives that provide important location information in the proper circumstances without fully tracking people we can advocate for a less dystopian use of the technology.
Under what state are you living, where you can expect it to never turn on you? Where corporations aren't exploitative and manipulative?
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.
A simple fix for this “passive creepiness” would be to have a setting like “share location with Alice, but only when she asks” or at least “Location shared with Alice (last checked one hour ago).”
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.)
It’s perhaps a bit better now, but back when trip-sharing features were first added to third-party mapping and delivery platforms, there was a real tendency to overshare. Many early implementations generated public URLs with sequential or low-entropy IDs that could be guessed or brute-forced. Anyone who knew the pattern could enumerate live or historical “shared trips,” exposing routes, addresses, and other metadata that were never meant to be public.
I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.
I share my location with a couple of people who, 99.9% of the time do not need it but 0.1% of the time it is rather useful.
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.
> It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information
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.
People keep saying sensitive, but I cannot think of a single thing these friends could possibly do with the information of where I am. Is this a mobster movie and they're going to hire a hitman? Are they going to follow me around and steal my car or break into my house? What exactly is the threat model I'm trying to mitigate here?
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.
You’re not being creative enough, maybe because you haven’t run into bad people before. I have known of people who:
* 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.
I love location sharing with friends. "Find my Jerry", "Find my Anna" we call it in our friend group. It simplifies logistics, gives us a narrow but fun little window into each others' worlds.
"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!
I will never forget what it was like to grow up in the 80s. As a child often I was at some kind of child care. After school programs, or a neighbors house. I remember what it was like, wanting my parents to pick me up. I lived in a place that was surrounded by bullies and abusive religious zealots. Often times I would be staring out the window or looking towards the road wondering when my loving parents would come and get me and take me away from the nightmare situation. Endless hours staring, wondering, hoping. Praying for them to pick me up and take me away.
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.
Would your parents have picked you up if real time location sharing existed? I understand your story is emotional and personal, but using it as an argument why you want to share your location at all times is a bit of a non-sequitur.
It was more about not knowing where they were, or when they were coming. With technology, children can always know where their parents are, not to mention they are only one text or call away.
In addition to the other arguments presented here, I have 24/7 location sharing enabled with my wife so that neither of us has to actively remember to check our phones all the time. And if it's potentially an emergency, it is still active if one of us is incapacitated.
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.
i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.
The fascist government won't need you to enable tracking, they can have the corporation that makes your OS silently gather it and give it to them, or simply have the phone carrier do it, again silently to the one carrying the device.
We're already all carrying a tracking device with us, willingly.
why would they need to do that? that's just how cell towers work. the government can and does also buy the location data on the market like anyone else.
yeah, the important part is that the government via third party surveillance gets much of the domestic spying they need without "technically" breaking the law, even though if they directly did any of the activities they would be breaking the law.
> i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.
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.
IIRC some of the social location sharing options have sold data in the past, eg Life 360 (I think they still sell data but claim that they've started making it aggregated/anonymous)
> turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable
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.
I wouldn't trust that. Google considered that an app-level setting previously, not a choice the user made to deny location data to Google. That kind of attitude is likely to have seeped into the organization, and "We know better" / "The user expects location to work for this even with GPS off" is quite likely still the prevailing attitude.
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.
> 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.
How the commentary was supposed to support your point was unclear. No such demarcation exists because people want some amount of privacy in public space? No such demarcation exists because a self righteous random person asserted privacy is a myth and anyone who disagreed with him lied to themselves at least?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
People ditch those small towns for the city to get away from small town busybodies, among other things.
Amongst my friends I have definitely concluded that the upsides outweigh the downsides. Amongst others, it's very convenient for meeting people. You don't need to look up the address, you just go to their bubble on the map.
It’s also good for seeing how far away someone is if you are waiting for them to meet up.
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.
I have location shared with a dozen or so of my friends. It has many times been useful to find out that we happen to be near each other and end up hanging out.
"Lighthouses in the sky" was pro-slavery & pro-racism Virginia Senator John Randolph's criticism of John Quincy Adams policy to build astronomical observatories throughout the US. Adams referred to the observatories as "lighthouses of the skies" and Randolph turned the phrase during the Congress of Panama to embarrass Adams. Could be complete coincidence that Dr. Getting used the same phrase, but this time with a productive connotation.
I just really wish there was a way to do live and on-request location sharing through Signal.
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.
Surveillance erodes trust and has an oppressive effect. This is a key mechanic of the panopticon, i.e. the modern prison, and the constant surveillance of late modern societies amounts to a 'prisonifying' of both private and public spaces.
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.
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.
Probably just a more fine-grained permissions system. Like allowing location to be viewed if your phone hasn't been touched in a configured amount of time, or if you're on your regular route home from work, or maybe you're specifically going out to be social and are fine with friends finding you, etc.
I typically find the people who do track their family constantly the more neurotic. I get people explaining to me at length why they track when I never asked. I was more than once accused of being a "distant parent" when people found out I didn't track my teenager. I get exasperated looks when I say I have no idea where my wife is currently. I don't feel the need to track my family, and I really don't care at all if other people do or don't. But the 'pro-tracking' people are always trying to convince me I'm somehow in the wrong. I find that bizarre.
I think they are “convincing you” because you are on the opposite side of an opinion.
You’ll notice in this thread, many anti-tracking people are trying to convince pro tracking people, and vise versa. This is common when there are two opposing sides of an argument.
None of the people in the article, nor the author, mention abuse. Are you responding to the article or what you imagine the discussion to be? It barely talks about safety, it’s merely one example, and is focused on the social effects.
It even makes the point that location sharing can lead to less social interaction, contrary to your own experience.
> Really just comes off as projection of your own insecurities.
No kidding, dude needs to know where everyone is AT ALL TIMES or he’s going to have a panic attack. Really makes you wonder what kind of pathology is behind these people who must have total surveillance, no matter the consequences.
Neuroticism is a property of an exchange, not an isolated phenomenon. If you're honest with yourself, you might start to see that we're all partners in a great dance.
Feel free to move to China or the UK if you prefer to be constantly watched over. I prefer freedom, thanks.
For all the problems that existed in the pre-mobile era, widespread loneliness wasn’t one of them. You don’t need 24/7 connectivity to everyone to have real relationships. You’re in here accusing people of having a mental illness because they want some privacy, yet you’re the one who seemingly needs a digital leash tying you to all your friends and family. What kind of insecurity and/or codependence is that?
Do you have a cellphone? If yes, you're being tracked. Do you have a smartphone? Well then you're being tracked by likely dozens of entities you don't even know about.
I leave my dumbphone at home most of the time. Why would I need it? You should try living in the moment more often instead of staring at a screen, it’s good for you.
If you want to, sure. It also means the rest of us can mock you for it unless you have a really good reason, like a serious medical condition or something. Don’t worry, nobody’s trying to take away your right to voluntarily give away your personal data.
I'm a very private person. I avoided social media for years, and I'm very aware of what info about my real life is shared on the internet. However, these comments made me aware of the feature on Google Maps and convinced me to try sharing with loved ones. I tried coming up with a strong reason for not doing that, but I couldn't find one. I'm aware that it's different for each person, but let's see how it works.
Thanks, friend. Your experience has helped me see the error of my ways. I thought that it was good to be private, but now I see that I was only misguided. I too was convinced to try the Google Maps location sharing feature, and it was super easy to share my location with everyone. My boss thought it was a great idea! Google really is a fantastic company, huh?
What? The author isn't claiming they were abused or a victim of abuse. Abuse is only mentioned through one specific story, which was from a friend:
> In one case, GPS was used to first construct an inaccurate and accusatory narrative about a partner’s behavior that nitpicked the details [...] and then to show up unannounced to physically confront them.
I mean, this very much does sound like abuse. What are you going on about and what is your issue with the post?
I share my realtime Google Maps location with 30 people, friends, family, people from the internet.
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.
>Why not?
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.
> As a random example, waiting for a date to show up is probably more exciting than having a precise read of their location.
You could just copy what delivery companies do: "Only 5 stops before you"
"Your date's previous date is running long. Please wait awkwardly at the restaurant at the table by yourself while everyone rolls the dice on whether you got stood up or not."
Sounds great!
> They can see where I am, down to my address, at any given time. Why not?
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.
A ton of people have mine and no one has ever given anyone shit about it.
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
Sounds incredibly creepy.
I do the same thing, just smaller group. Answering the questions you’re asking just requires candor: I need some me time. I wasn’t feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
> just requires candor: I need some me time. I wasn’t feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
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.
they might just have reasonable friends. I personally stopped putting up with people who annoy me in 2018 and I'm much better off for it.
Most likely the GP who shares location with 30 people just doesn't get into these kinds of situations. Y'know, since they'd have stopped if they did.
The obvious one being your wife noticing you're at your mistress' house when you told her you were over at your girlfriend's, but outside of that, the problem the people that are positive about sharing their location is that it's also being abused by the abusive. That's a social problem, and not something technology can solve. I share my location with people I love and trust and will understand that I was busy and had an itinerary I needed to stick to and couldn't see them even though I was right next door, and if they ask we'll have a conversation about it that isn't awkward. Good for me but the problem isn't that I have good people in my life that I share this with, but that other people have bad people in their lives that they're forced to share it with, for whatever reason. I don't have an answer for that.
If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your location with that person.
If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and probably OP).
> If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your location with that person. 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.
Maybe if you don’t lie to people you wouldn’t have that issue?
These seems to be about guilting and pressuring rather then lying. That person does not have issue because they lie, they have issue because others feel entitled to pressure them.
> Maybe if you don’t lie to people you wouldn’t have that issue?
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.
But why is potentially explaining a change of plans such an issue?
Because having to keep track of who might have noticed you on the map—then explaining your choices to them—is draining and makes you feel like you can’t make a basic personal choice without justifying it.
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.
Then just don't? If it's none of their business then it's none of their business, if they're unreasonable then that's their problem, if you don't want to justify it then just don't?
Or just don’t share your location and sidestep the whole problem? It’s not like you won’t be invited to a party because you don’t share your location 24/7. (If this is somehow actually the case then you need new friends.)
Well that's just going in circles. The question was "Why would you share?" and someone gave their list of perceived benefits. These were written off on the basis of creating a responsibility of explaining yourself to everyone. I was only responding to that assertion. But you're right, we could just not have this conversation at all...
> The question was "Why would you share?" and someone gave their list of perceived benefits. These were written off on the basis of creating a responsibility of explaining yourself to everyone.
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.
Nope, I was responding to one of the Why Not? rationales. What I said just now was in response to a complete sidestep of the issue, which is something else and honestly quite frustrating.
You got direct answers to your question, nobody is going circles or avoiding your question. If anything your responses seem confused.
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.
I'm not asking to hear anything more and I'm quite astonished that you feel the need to continue this. I read a point, and I made my counter-point and the response was "well you could just not bother." Why are we still bothering to talk about any of it?
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?
Yeah but can't you just post an announce "i'll be in X for Y days" on SNS like the old way ? It's way nicer and a much more explicit invitation for hangout than an icon on on map ;)
I suspect that they are trying to recreate the experience of bumping into someone they know. Since the destruction of third-spaces, it is increasingly unlikely that you'll serendipitously interact with someone in an unplanned, but welcome, social environment. Leaving your location on for friends and family in this way signals something close to "If you see me, say hi". Whereas announcing "I will be at X for Y time" is a bit more heavy handed. And just knowing that isn't sufficient to actually act on the information, you still have to reach out and plan something unless you are an granular as the actual building you are in, which feels weird. It feels a little intrusive to constantly be announcing my location. Like "Hey! Hey! obk0943t! I'm gonna be in NYC just so you know!" If I just left my location on, then /if/ you care, you can find out. But if you don't, you are not interrupted with the information. Finally, posting leaves a record, whereas location sharing is always "right now". Sure, someone can use that to construct a timeline, but that takes effort on their part (and possibly malice).
Modern lives may or may not be more spontaneous (doubtful), but not everyone has the same capacity for planning as you do. Sometimes I'll randomly find myself 30 miles from home on an spontaneous side mission, and would love to drop in on friends I don't usually see, if they're around.
I don't think I even have 30 different people in my contacts list who I've talked to more than once in the past month, let alone that many living close enough to me to casually invite me somewhere because I'm nearby.
It will become a systemic issue when sharing is the norm and you somehow don't.
My only location sharing is with my wife. It is very useful to check things like how far away she is before getting home so I can start dinner, or seeing if she has left the house yet or can I still text her to ask for her to do something at home.
My location sharing with my partner is a Signal message. “On my way home!” Works great, hasn’t failed yet. And I can still make it a surprise, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?
You’re both doing what you want, which I find awesome.
We often send those, but sometimes we are busy or traffic is worse than normal. I don’t want to text to ask where she is, because she might be driving and I don’t want to distract her.
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.
[dead]
My location sharing with my partner is a sudden appearance. "Hello, I'm here!" Works great, hasn't failed yet. And I can still just not show up, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?
About a year ago, I started sharing location with my girlfriend. In general I hated the idea and I'd sworn I'd never do it in previous relationships. But she lives about 20 minutes away, and she convinced me it would be nice for the reasons you outlined.
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.
Read receipts are just as much of a social anxiety trigger for me; “oh they read my message, why haven’t they responded” or “they read my last few messages, why didn’t they read this one, am I boring them”. I turned those off entirely. Sometimes new acquaintances ask me why. I tell them it stresses me out and makes me overthink social interactions. Most people are amenable to this explanation.
Yeah, for me as well. Although for me, it's not because I wonder why someone hasn't responded... it's because often I'm in the middle of something and don't feel like responding right away, and I get overly concerned that the other person will think I'm being rude! So I don't use RCS with anyone besides my girlfriend. But there's an implicit agreement in it that we try to get back to each other fairly quickly. Neither of us wants the other to think we're up to something sketchy. This helped ease me into our new non-tracking reality.
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.
Same here. On my WhatsApp, read receipts and online status are off, and have been since I first found the feature. The way "they left me on read" has found its way into common English is disturbing.
This makes sense. My wife and I didn’t start sharing our locations until we had already developed complete trust in each other. It has never caused us any issues, because we don’t have doubts about our trust.
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!)
The story is crazy, but it’s real and that’s important.
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.
Thank you for sharing your story! Yeah, it's not for everybody. If I was an obsessive teenager when this technology existed I'd be pterodactyl-shit crazy. I'm able to interact with it in a mostly healthy way these days, after a lot of therapy and medication that has to do with me maturing as a person and nothing to do with the technology itself. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd grown up with this technology.
> I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities.
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.
>> instead of attributing it to a tech failure
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.
Yeah I think my response was a bit harsher than I intended so sorry about that. I appreciate you responding
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).
Trusting the output of an LLM? Ouch.
Trusting your partner? Much better idea.
How do you even spoof your location on a modern phone OS? xposed module?
Android's developer mode has an option to "Set mock location app" so that you can test an app you're building that relies on location data. Various spoofing apps take advantage of this. On iOS, I don't know.
second phone, but who're you cheating on?
Yes totally batshit crazy but in the usual manner of real human relationships. Thanks for sharing (your story)!
Best use for location sharing I can think of is traveling in a convoy of more than one vehicle, when you plan to meet up for lunch somewhere along the way. At least one person in each car shares their location with each other during the trip, so you can tell that car B is 20 minutes away from the restaurant while car A is 30 minutes away, so car B can afford to stop for a bathroom break.
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.
A theme park or festival would also be a good one.
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.
It’s actually a good use case. However what we usually do is decide where to meet/stop and we wait for others to reach and until everyone arrives we relax, joke around, munch on something or so. If someone is getting too late then we call and check and if they’re fine and are just getting late then we weigh on making fun of them and pulling their legs and sometimes actually do that. Stuff like that.
Location sharing is creepy. It's weird how many people track their partner's movement.
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 share my location with 10+ people, including my partner. My wife and participating friends all know, trust and love each other and none of us care if we know where each other are, but at times where we are coordinating a plan on the fly FindMy has been incredibly useful. If I’m letting weather apps and etc know and sell my location to data brokers, letting my inner circle see my location isn’t that deep.
I suppose it depends on the context. For some couples there has been some past dishonesty, and the location sharing can serve as a measure of accountability. That doesn’t mean it’s always monitored (though I’ve definitely seen some people obsess over this to an unhealthy degree), but it helps the one who was offended feel more secure and keeps the one who did the offending honest.
If you need location sharing to trust somebody, you would probably be better off not being together at all.
Hard agree. Location sharing and stuff like that is addressing a symptom instead of a problem. Just break it off if the trust is broken
Trust that needs to be technologically mediated like that isn't trust.
Until someone figures out they can leave their phone at their desk and do whatever they want, anyway.
Exactly, all location sharing does is give a false sense of security. You either trust a partner or you don’t.
That sounds horrible.
When you said it depends on context, I thought you’d give a positive context. Using as a means to try and restore broken trust doesn’t sound very positive. Plus, if the dishonest one knows the cell phone is being tracked, they can work around that.
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.
I have been eagerly sharing my location with as many people as possible for years. I have not been very discerning about it - and in fact if anyone in this thread wants my location feel free to message me on signal (drex.64) and I'll share on google maps. No need to share back (though I don't mind)!
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.
> There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing
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.
That's certainly one of the options! However I generally disagree with your point of view. You are welcome to hold to it, but many people already know where you are at all times and I suspect if you ask your community they will have little reflection on what level of sharing feels appropriate. I personally do not want to put the genie all the way back into the bottle.
I've never once allowed a company like Home Depot to know my location with Location Sharing. If their site needs to know what store is "my store", then I use zip code searching and manually setting the store.
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
Who might those many people be who know where I am at all times?
The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The cell phone companies (approximately but they can triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.
[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).
Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for something the authorities would not agree with, I most certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.
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.
> 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.
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.
Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
> I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in.
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.
To speak bluntly, I'm not sure you're considering that many people want to hide or to be able to hide activities like adultery, gambling, prostitution, unhealthy food, spending too much time in bars, leaving their wife and kids at home to just go park and sit in a parking lot to get away, etc.
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.
Shared location also makes domestic violence much worst and much harder to escape from. It is not something exceptional or rare.
The other danger with it is a targeted harassment and stalker.
Both of these are more common then whatever danger corporations represents.
I know! I am not sure you are considering that at the moment full sharing is the default and, in many cases, not optional. It seems like you're under the impression that I want us to share location all of the time when I've just said that's too much. It's just the option we have at the moment. We need to figure out when and how to share location and how to develop expectations around when people can know things.
I think the issue with
> 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.
If you're correct then there's no hope. People will realize they can have the data and will take refusal to provide it as a proxy for misbehavior. For some that time is already here. If we can build alternatives that provide important location information in the proper circumstances without fully tracking people we can advocate for a less dystopian use of the technology.
Under what state are you living, where you can expect it to never turn on you? Where corporations aren't exploitative and manipulative?
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.
Nowhere! It is bad that corporations have my location. That's why I am trying to get people to think about how they want this kind of thing to work.
Yes, and the solution to the fact that corporations have your information is not to give more people your information.
A simple fix for this “passive creepiness” would be to have a setting like “share location with Alice, but only when she asks” or at least “Location shared with Alice (last checked one hour ago).”
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.)
It’s perhaps a bit better now, but back when trip-sharing features were first added to third-party mapping and delivery platforms, there was a real tendency to overshare. Many early implementations generated public URLs with sequential or low-entropy IDs that could be guessed or brute-forced. Anyone who knew the pattern could enumerate live or historical “shared trips,” exposing routes, addresses, and other metadata that were never meant to be public.
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 share my location with a couple of people who, 99.9% of the time do not need it but 0.1% of the time it is rather useful.
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.
> It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information
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.
People keep saying sensitive, but I cannot think of a single thing these friends could possibly do with the information of where I am. Is this a mobster movie and they're going to hire a hitman? Are they going to follow me around and steal my car or break into my house? What exactly is the threat model I'm trying to mitigate here?
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.
You’re not being creative enough, maybe because you haven’t run into bad people before. I have known of people who:
* 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.
The article’s first narrative revolves around a phone being held captive in a police station for days because the station was closed for the weekend?
What kind of police station maintains business hours?
> 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.
I believe this is true in my little town in the US as well. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.
With that said, I'm reasonably certain even our town has open hours on the weekend...
>What kind of police station maintains business hours?
"Sorry, retrieving property is Sgt SoAndSo's job, come back when he's here, which <checks schedule> is 2-10am Tuesday."
In US cities they have substations and neighborhood stations. I'd guess one of those.
More rural areas
I love location sharing with friends. "Find my Jerry", "Find my Anna" we call it in our friend group. It simplifies logistics, gives us a narrow but fun little window into each others' worlds.
"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!
I will never forget what it was like to grow up in the 80s. As a child often I was at some kind of child care. After school programs, or a neighbors house. I remember what it was like, wanting my parents to pick me up. I lived in a place that was surrounded by bullies and abusive religious zealots. Often times I would be staring out the window or looking towards the road wondering when my loving parents would come and get me and take me away from the nightmare situation. Endless hours staring, wondering, hoping. Praying for them to pick me up and take me away.
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.
Would your parents have picked you up if real time location sharing existed? I understand your story is emotional and personal, but using it as an argument why you want to share your location at all times is a bit of a non-sequitur.
It was more about not knowing where they were, or when they were coming. With technology, children can always know where their parents are, not to mention they are only one text or call away.
Why not only letting them track you when you're going to pick them up, or better when they ask you to?
In addition to the other arguments presented here, I have 24/7 location sharing enabled with my wife so that neither of us has to actively remember to check our phones all the time. And if it's potentially an emergency, it is still active if one of us is incapacitated.
Or.. just messaging when you're on your way?
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.
i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.
The fascist government won't need you to enable tracking, they can have the corporation that makes your OS silently gather it and give it to them, or simply have the phone carrier do it, again silently to the one carrying the device.
We're already all carrying a tracking device with us, willingly.
The government can also just set up their own cell tracking towers, cut out the middleman.
Or just mandate that the telcos do it and make it illegal to tell anyone about it.
why would they need to do that? that's just how cell towers work. the government can and does also buy the location data on the market like anyone else.
yeah, the important part is that the government via third party surveillance gets much of the domestic spying they need without "technically" breaking the law, even though if they directly did any of the activities they would be breaking the law.
And yet they do that all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
> i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.
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.
IIRC some of the social location sharing options have sold data in the past, eg Life 360 (I think they still sell data but claim that they've started making it aggregated/anonymous)
> turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable
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.
I have location services off, so at least my phone doesn't usually have my location, and neither does Google.
That is wildly optimistic.
There are still various Google processes that likely still gather your location, and certainly your phone carrier does.
I don't think Google does if location services are off.
I wouldn't trust that. Google considered that an app-level setting previously, not a choice the user made to deny location data to Google. That kind of attitude is likely to have seeped into the organization, and "We know better" / "The user expects location to work for this even with GPS off" is quite likely still the prevailing attitude.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523992
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> Even [Jane] Jacobs believed that “there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space.”
"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.
How the commentary was supposed to support your point was unclear. No such demarcation exists because people want some amount of privacy in public space? No such demarcation exists because a self righteous random person asserted privacy is a myth and anyone who disagreed with him lied to themselves at least?
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.
> 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.
The National Motorists Association blog used to write about that all the time.
(They still might, but their RSS feed has died, so I no longer see their posts.)
> How the commentary was supposed to support your point was unclear.
Jane Jacobs is not at an extreme position on the scale of how much importance people assign to privacy.
> 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.
People ditch those small towns for the city to get away from small town busybodies, among other things.
Amongst my friends I have definitely concluded that the upsides outweigh the downsides. Amongst others, it's very convenient for meeting people. You don't need to look up the address, you just go to their bubble on the map.
It’s also good for seeing how far away someone is if you are waiting for them to meet up.
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.
I have location shared with a dozen or so of my friends. It has many times been useful to find out that we happen to be near each other and end up hanging out.
"Lighthouses in the sky" was pro-slavery & pro-racism Virginia Senator John Randolph's criticism of John Quincy Adams policy to build astronomical observatories throughout the US. Adams referred to the observatories as "lighthouses of the skies" and Randolph turned the phrase during the Congress of Panama to embarrass Adams. Could be complete coincidence that Dr. Getting used the same phrase, but this time with a productive connotation.
wrong thread?
I've shared my location with 60+ people, and started the habit ten years ago. I've never experienced a downside.
Except one time when doing some airsoft-equivalent and it was used to locate me.
I just really wish there was a way to do live and on-request location sharing through Signal.
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.
https://taylor.town/find-my
Surveillance erodes trust and has an oppressive effect. This is a key mechanic of the panopticon, i.e. the modern prison, and the constant surveillance of late modern societies amounts to a 'prisonifying' of both private and public spaces.
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...
what are some good solutions to this? proximate location sharing?
Probably just a more fine-grained permissions system. Like allowing location to be viewed if your phone hasn't been touched in a configured amount of time, or if you're on your regular route home from work, or maybe you're specifically going out to be social and are fine with friends finding you, etc.
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I typically find the people who do track their family constantly the more neurotic. I get people explaining to me at length why they track when I never asked. I was more than once accused of being a "distant parent" when people found out I didn't track my teenager. I get exasperated looks when I say I have no idea where my wife is currently. I don't feel the need to track my family, and I really don't care at all if other people do or don't. But the 'pro-tracking' people are always trying to convince me I'm somehow in the wrong. I find that bizarre.
I think they are “convincing you” because you are on the opposite side of an opinion.
You’ll notice in this thread, many anti-tracking people are trying to convince pro tracking people, and vise versa. This is common when there are two opposing sides of an argument.
None of the people in the article, nor the author, mention abuse. Are you responding to the article or what you imagine the discussion to be? It barely talks about safety, it’s merely one example, and is focused on the social effects.
It even makes the point that location sharing can lead to less social interaction, contrary to your own experience.
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That's not tough love, that's just dodging a topic you dislike by insinuating that anyone who disagrees must be mentally ill.
Really just comes off as projection of your own insecurities.
> Really just comes off as projection of your own insecurities.
No kidding, dude needs to know where everyone is AT ALL TIMES or he’s going to have a panic attack. Really makes you wonder what kind of pathology is behind these people who must have total surveillance, no matter the consequences.
Shaming people for having past trauma and seeking therapy is so 90s. You're living in the past, man.
*an art
You’re in for a surprise at the next paragraph too.
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Neuroticism is a property of an exchange, not an isolated phenomenon. If you're honest with yourself, you might start to see that we're all partners in a great dance.
Feel free to move to China or the UK if you prefer to be constantly watched over. I prefer freedom, thanks.
For all the problems that existed in the pre-mobile era, widespread loneliness wasn’t one of them. You don’t need 24/7 connectivity to everyone to have real relationships. You’re in here accusing people of having a mental illness because they want some privacy, yet you’re the one who seemingly needs a digital leash tying you to all your friends and family. What kind of insecurity and/or codependence is that?
Do you have a cellphone? If yes, you're being tracked. Do you have a smartphone? Well then you're being tracked by likely dozens of entities you don't even know about.
I leave my dumbphone at home most of the time. Why would I need it? You should try living in the moment more often instead of staring at a screen, it’s good for you.
You don't know me at all, but you're acting like you do.
What? Doesn't freedom precisely mean that you can share your location if you want to?
If you want to, sure. It also means the rest of us can mock you for it unless you have a really good reason, like a serious medical condition or something. Don’t worry, nobody’s trying to take away your right to voluntarily give away your personal data.
Give away my personal data to my friends and family?
I'm a very private person. I avoided social media for years, and I'm very aware of what info about my real life is shared on the internet. However, these comments made me aware of the feature on Google Maps and convinced me to try sharing with loved ones. I tried coming up with a strong reason for not doing that, but I couldn't find one. I'm aware that it's different for each person, but let's see how it works.
Thanks, friend. Your experience has helped me see the error of my ways. I thought that it was good to be private, but now I see that I was only misguided. I too was convinced to try the Google Maps location sharing feature, and it was super easy to share my location with everyone. My boss thought it was a great idea! Google really is a fantastic company, huh?
Maybe I'm lucky, but my boss is not one of my loved ones. To each their own, though.
What? The author isn't claiming they were abused or a victim of abuse. Abuse is only mentioned through one specific story, which was from a friend:
> In one case, GPS was used to first construct an inaccurate and accusatory narrative about a partner’s behavior that nitpicked the details [...] and then to show up unannounced to physically confront them.
I mean, this very much does sound like abuse. What are you going on about and what is your issue with the post?
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Please stop this. You've been on HN long enough to know that this kind of commenting is unacceptable.