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Every smartphone has a stalker’s paradise of shareable location data. With this treasure trove, you can watch when a package arrives on your doorstep, see what restaurants are nearby, and even track people. Location tracking is so accurate it can pinpoint a single person in a crowd. The technology is being touted as useful, not creepy.
What is the acceptable level of online surveillance? I thought we all agreed that ideally there would be no surveillance. Privacy activists try to limit the information we share, and laptops are sold with built-in webcam covers. Earlier this month, Microsoft backtracked on plans for a new feature that would take a screenshot of a user’s computer every five seconds to train artificial intelligence. But location-tracking apps like Life360 are being downloaded voluntarily.
How popular it is depends on your age. I hate being watched, especially since I’m a slow mover. I took a quick poll of my friends and found that most of my friends, who are over 40, either didn’t know that their phones could be used in this way or weren’t particularly interested. As one person put it: “The idea of appearing as a dot on someone else’s map is reminiscent of a dystopian device implanted in an unwilling arm.”
But my friends, all about 10 years younger than me, all seem to stalk each other with abandon. My 29-year-old cousin sets his girlfriend’s location on the lock screen of his phone. Neither of them feels comfortable watching or being watched in this way. They say it makes them feel safer.
This isn’t because they’re unaware of the importance of online privacy; it’s because they’re realistic about the privacy available to them. If you have a smartphone and don’t mind disabling useful features like maps, they know that your location is already being monitored. If app creators, smartphone manufacturers, and advertising companies are already tracking your location, why wouldn’t they share that information with people they know?
And even if you turn the feature off, you may still be monitored: Last year, Google agreed to pay $93 million after being accused of collecting location data even after users had disabled the setting.
Location sharing has been around for over a decade. Apple’s Find My app was first released in 2010 to help locate lost phones, but has since evolved into a feature for sharing data between friends. That same year, Facebook introduced Places, a location feature that allowed users to share their movements. This was also the era of location-based social networking startups like Foursquare.
But it wasn’t until Snapchat’s 2017 launch of its location-sharing virtual map that tracking really started to seem like harmless fun. Users could see their friends grouped together as smiling Bitmojis. It was game-like: A Bustle reporter likened checking out your friend’s location to playing The Sims.
If you want to start tracking people you know, there’s some etiquette involved. For example, it’s OK to use the tracker to make sure your friends got home safe at the end of a night out, but don’t surprise them on the street. Also, be thoughtful about who you share your data with — only family and close friends, not new dating prospects. But there’s a danger of coming off as cold shoulders here: stopping location sharing is the modern equivalent of erasing someone from your photos.
So I asked my cousin: Is it a bit like the rules of cell phones? In theory, you can call anyone at any time of the day, but most people agree to keep each other at peace. Unfortunately, this analogy doesn’t hold true: my cousin and her friends are okay with using their cell phones to track each other, but they would never dream of using them to make phone calls.
Location tracking is attractive as a safety measure, especially for elderly parents and children. The risk is that sharing personal information becomes normalized to a level that is difficult to reverse. Once we become accustomed to sharing our location with family and friends, we may one day be happy to share it with employers or even government agencies.
Geospatial monitoring can also be a tool for behavior modification: A study from the University of California, San Diego Department of Psychiatry found that up to half of American families use some form of tracking, ostensibly for safety reasons, but that just knowing they’re being tracked can change a child’s behavior.
Few are immune to this pressure. The internet is sometimes described as a panopticon, where our actions are monitored from every angle by online companies. By tracking each other, we give this model even more power.
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