It started because Kelsey McKinney wanted to know where her
sister was every single moment of the day.
“I like to call her and she likes to call me and it was only
practical to share our locations so that we would know whether or not now was a
good time to call without asking,” said McKinney, 31, a journalist and the host
of the podcast Normal Gossip. The sisters began sharing their locations using
their iPhones’ Find My Friends feature, which allows users to visualize all of
their location-sharing friends on a global map.
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“Pretty quickly, I came to love looking at her little dot,”
McKinney said. “It was affectionate to me, and I started asking my friends to
share their locations with me, or just sharing my location with them and hoping
they would reciprocate.”
Location sharing has long been the domain of parents with
wayward teens or obsessive partners, but more and more, apps like Find My
Friends are being used by young people who want to know where their friends are
and what they’re up to, without actually having to ask them.
Most smartphones offer location sharing capabilities, but since
more than half of Americans use iPhones, Find My Friends is by far the most
popular.
Not what it was intended for
Apple’s Find My function was not conceived as a way to lovingly
stalk your pals, but that’s what it has slowly become. When it debuted, in
2009, as Find My iPhone, the app allowed users to employ GPS data to track
their lost iPhones; Find My Friends came two years later, marketed to anxious
parents who wanted to keep tabs on their children.
In 2019, the company integrated its location-tracking
capabilities into a single app, called Find My, which lets users see the
location of their friends and Apple devices. Since then, Find My Friends has
become a digital calling card of sorts, a way to express tenderness and
intimacy between close friends, and draw a distinction between them and the
rest of their online acquaintances.
Courtney Trop, a Los Angeles style blogger and the founder of
Stevie, a CBD brand, said she uses Find My Friends with about 15 people,
including her best friend, Perry. “We use it to stalk each other to see if we
went on shopping trips without each other,” Trop said. If she is revealed via
Find My to be shopping unaccompanied, her friend lets her have it in a cascade
of “crazy messages”: “You went without me! Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re at
Replica right now!”
Safely check on friends through the app
Several people said 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 recalled, “so
I knew exactly where she was.”
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Americans 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.
Sense of powerlessness
Yet despite this growing discomfort, there is 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. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that “some 81 percent
of the public say that the potential risks they face because of data collection
by companies outweigh the benefits, and 66 percent say the same about
government data collection.”
Little to no control over personal information and data
Pew also found that most Americans “feel they have little or no
control over how these entities use their personal information.” 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 said 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 said.
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 said. “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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