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On every smartphone there sits a stalker’s paradise of location data ready to be shared. This treasure trove is what allows you to watch a food delivery pull up outside your door and check what restaurants are nearby. It can also be used to track you. Location tracking is so precise that it can pinpoint one person in a crowd. And this tech is marketed as convenient, not creepy.
What is an acceptable level of online surveillance? I had assumed we all agreed that the ideal was none. Privacy campaigners try to limit the information we share and laptops are sold with built-in webcam covers. Earlier this month, Microsoft rowed back plans for a new feature that took screenshots of a user’s PC every five seconds in order to train artificial intelligence. Yet location tracking apps like Life360 are downloaded voluntarily.
Exactly how popular they are depends on your age. I don’t like the idea of being watched — not least because my movements are so dull. A quick poll of friends found that those who were, like me, in their 40s and older either had no idea they could use their phone in this way or had relatively little interest in doing so. As one put it: the thought of appearing as a dot on someone else’s map has echoes of dystopian devices implanted into unwilling arms.
But friends a decade or so younger all seem to be tracking one another with abandon. My 29-year-old cousin has the location of his girlfriend as the lockscreen on his phone. Neither finds the idea of monitoring or being monitored in this way unnerving. They say it makes them feel safer.
This is not because they are blind to the importance of online privacy. It is because they are realistic about the privacy that is available. They know that if you own a smartphone and don’t want to disable useful things like maps then your location is already being watched. If app creators, smartphone makers and ad companies are already tracking your location then why not share the information with people you know?
Besides, even when you turn the features off you may still be watched. Last year, Google agreed to pay $93mn to settle claims after it was accused of collecting location data even after users disabled the settings.
Location sharing has been around for more than a decade. Apple’s Find My app was originally released in 2010 for users to locate a lost phone; it then developed into data sharing between friends. The same year, Facebook unveiled Places, a location feature that let users share their movements. This was also the era of location-based social network start-ups like Foursquare.
But what really made tracking seem like harmless fun was the arrival of Snapchat’s location-sharing virtual Map in 2017. Users can now see their friends grouped together as smiling Bitmojis. It looks like a game. A writer for Bustle magazine compared checking on her friends’ locations to playing The Sims.
If you want to start tracking the people you know then there is some etiquette involved. It is fine to use tracking to check that a friend got home safely at the end of a night out, for example, but not to surprise them on the street. And think carefully about who you share data with. This is for family and close friends only, not new dates. But there’s a danger of snubbing here to: putting an end to location sharing is the modern version of cutting someone out of the photos.
So, I ask my cousin, is it a bit like the rules around mobile phones? In theory you can call anyone at any time of the day but most of us have agreed to leave one another in peace. Unfortunately, this analogy did not work. While my cousin and his friends are happy to use their phones to track one another, they wouldn’t dream of using them to make calls.
Location tracking as a safety measure, particularly for elderly parents and children, is tempting. The risk is that it normalises personal information sharing to an extent that will be hard to reverse. If you grow comfortable sharing your location with your family and friends then perhaps one day you’ll be happy to share it with your employer — even government agencies.
Geospatial data monitoring can be a tool for behavioural modification too. Research by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego suggested that up to half of all US families use some form of tracking, ostensibly for safety. But it also found that simply knowing they were being tracked could change a child’s behaviour.
Few of us are immune to this pressure. The internet is sometimes described as a panopticon in which our activities are surveilled by online companies from every angle. By tracking one another we hand this model more power.
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