Let’s stalk each other: The perks of tracking your friends’ location

Several people say they used the app to track friends when they were going on Tinder dates, or to make sure they got home safely after a night of partying. It came in handy for Kevin LeBlanc, 25, a fashion associate in New York, when his friend passed out on the street one evening, and he used the app to locate her. The friend’s mother told LeBlanc that her daughter was in an ambulance and asked him to follow it. “I had her location on,” he recalls, “so I knew exactly where she was”.

When the COVID pandemic forced people to turn to the internet for entertainment, home delivery and more, awareness of the way companies and governments use the personal data we publish online also increased.

Yet despite this growing discomfort, there’s also a sense of powerlessness, a general resignation to the idea that the internet is an inescapable part of modern life, and that forking over your data is just part of the bargain. If tech giants and governments have access to your personal data, some may think, why shouldn’t your friends and family?

Apple’s Find My App uses end-to-end encryption, which means the company can’t technically see the locations of its users, but that doesn’t mean everyone is comfortable with sharing their locations with the company or with their friends. McKinney says that she had a few friends who don’t feel comfortable sharing their locations, but that she wasn’t a stickler for reciprocity. “Some of my buddies are private and don’t want me to see their location, but that’s fine: They must see my location anyway,” she says.

It’s true that there is perhaps nothing more intimate than having live location sharing on – the level of trust you have to have in someone to willingly disclose just how much time you spend sitting in your apartment watching TV! But location sharing can also provide a feeling of closeness even when you’re far away.

McKinney acknowledges that part of the appeal of the app comes from the fact that she’s “extremely nosy”. “But I also think it provides me a feeling of safety to know that my friends are OK,” she says. “It is comforting even to look at my list and be like, ‘These are all my pals, and they exist in the world even if they are not here with me.’”

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A trend on TikTok in which people share screenshots of their Find My Friends maps seems to have arisen from the same sentiment: “Me checking find my friends to make sure all my sims are where they’re supposed to be,” one user wrote.

For Matt Brown, 31, an executive coordinator at a hedge fund in New York, Find My Friends is less a casual pastime than a lifestyle. “I’m always preaching that Find My Friends is my favourite app,” he says.

Brown tracks the location of 47 of his friends across the world. “As somebody who lives in New York, spontaneity is really hard,” he says. “It’s hard to just be like: ‘Hey what are you doing right now? Do you want to grab dinner?’”

He says he loves Find My Friends because no matter where he is in the city, someone he knows is probably close by. “I’ll be like: ‘Hey, what are you doing right now? I’m at this bar – do you want to come meet me?’”

McKinney also called Find My Friends her favourite app. “My favourite thing to do is to award one of my friends Dot of the Week for being the most interesting dot to watch that week,” she says. One of her friends recently won Dot of the Week two weeks in a row for her trip to Europe. “I was following her little dot in Rome, and I was so happy every day to see that she was somewhere else having fun!”

Of course, Find My Friends is only as accurate as the GPS data it has access to; almost everybody who uses it religiously has a story about the panic that set in when someone’s dot appeared in a place it shouldn’t. Mariel Tyler, a photographer in New York, says that once when she went to check on her sister’s location during a Tinder date, the app said that she was in “the Hudson River”. McKinney was recently staying at a hotel next to a hospital, which sent one of her friends into a spiral when she checked the app and thought McKinney had been hospitalised.

To a generation who grew up alongside the internet, location sharing may feel less like a privacy threat and more like an expression of affection and trust. Using Find My Friends requires the ability to put jealousy or FOMO aside and feel nothing but joy for the friend whose little dot is ricocheting around a stadium, even if she got Taylor Swift tickets and you didn’t. Feeling happy when your friends are thriving, even at times when you might not be, is the purest expression of friendship. As one Twitter user put it: “I love find my friends.. Like aww that’s where my friends are :)“

The New York Times

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