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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Readit News
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.
You could just copy what delivery companies do: "Only 5 stops before you"
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.
It's mostly just 'yooooo I didn't realize you were near X' or 'how was Y? I saw it when checking where my buddy was'
Dunno maybe someone's has been messing with me all these years and I'm oblivious
If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and probably OP).
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 Comment
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.
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!)
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.
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.
Then you turn off location sharing after the trip, because you don't actually want to share your location with casual acquaintances all the time. At least, I certainly don't.
In the past we’d always designate a meeting spot if people got separated. These days, location sharing can solve that and no one is ever really lost.
Back when Foursquare was a thing, Brad from Phone Losers of America would do pranks where he calls businesses and has them page someone who had shared their location.
I was thinking of a one person realizing they need some milk, so they see their spouse is at the grocery store already, or on their way home with one on the way. They can make that timely call if it makes sense, and if it doesn’t make sense based on the location, they can add it to the shopping list.
My sister shares her location with me and I will use it to know if it’s a good time to call. On Sunday she goes to church, but I don’t know when. I can check the location and see if she’s in a church or somewhere else, so I’m not calling when she can’t answer. I do the same thing with my dad, I will generally only call if I see he is at home, so I’m not interrupting an event he might be at.
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.
Indeed, such as "don't, tf is wrong with you?" People don't need to know where I am at all times. I don't need to know where anyone is at all times. Stop normalizing this insane practice.
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.
There is a huge difference between giving Home Depot permissions to know your location while you are in a Home Depot vs giving Home Depot permissions to know your location 100% of the time.
If I was using a Home Depot app and I wanted the app to know my location, I would share location data using the "Allow While Using App" option instead of the "Always" option. I can't imagine a scenario in which I would want Home Depot to a continuous stream of my location data.
When you're mentally or morally or -whatever term you want- strong, you might miss that some people have things they want to hide that might not be burglary or trespass or murder, but nonetheless they don't want to be broadcast to their social circle.
Maybe we need a term for the Overton window applied to morality (in social terms). If your lifestyle doesn't fit neatly into the thickest part of that window, you might object to always on location sharing but be unable to honestly and openly admit why, leading to people like yourself being puzzled why others might be resistant.
The other danger with it is a targeted harassment and stalker.
Both of these are more common then whatever danger corporations represents.
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.
If I share my location with someone, I can’t tell the difference if they’re never looking at it, or if they’re checking it every minute. That’s what makes it creepy for someone to be checking it every minute – the surveilled user doesn’t know.
(Maybe this is already a feature… I’ve never enabled this thing.)
I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.
https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/
I do not care if they know where I am, I do not care if they have commentary about my location. I guess if they got weird about it I would turn it off but I could not imagine a situation where that would be true.
It's not "dangerous", I am as unbothered by any consequence of my location being known by them as it is possible to be.
It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information. It is also possible to have relationships with people where you actually don't care about each other's business.
This is true, but it’s also possible to not realize your relationship is unhealthy until it’s too late. Trust should be earned, not given, especially with something as sensitive as location data. It should be years into a relationship before you even consider this unless you have proven yourself to be a truly excellent judge of character.
It’s also possible to share your location in ways that aren’t private, allowing intermediaries to get this sensitive information and either sell it or better manipulate you using targeted ads. Location data can be misused in some pretty serious ways, especially if someone wishes you harm, so it’s best to avoid handing it out if you can avoid it.
Why wouldn't I give my mother my location? Because I figure it would trigger a series of invasive or annoying conversations. That's it, that's the worst thing I can imagine, an annoying conversation.
>It’s also possible to share your location in ways that aren’t private
My phone, and Apple already know my location. I'm not changing that whether or not I share my location with people.