“If you can see where your friends are and what they’re doing, you can also see when they’re gathering and you’re not there,” Ms. That increased awareness “can be troubling and emotionally difficult,” she said. The fear of missing out, typically fostered by social media, can extend to Find My because location sharing reveals how and with whom people spend their time, said Amanda Lenhart, who studies how technology affects families at the technology research nonprofit Data & Society. “When that friendship is no longer there, I immediately take my location back,” she said. From her apartment in Binghamton, N.Y., she said she typically checked the app five times a day and played “a fun little guessing game” of where everybody was. She currently shares her location with 18 people. Calvin-Nau’s map on Find My opened up to a constellation of contact icons scattered across the country. “There was no reason for anybody to be like, ‘Where you at?’ You could just check.”Īfter she graduated, Ms. “Everybody knew where everybody was at all times,” she said. She and her friends checked it to make sure everybody got home safe after a night out or to see whether they could meet up. In college, the app was as much about safety as it was about socializing. “No one has normalized pushing against that sharing.”Īsked for comment, a spokeswoman for Apple referred to a support page for Find My with instructions on how to start and stop sharing locations.įor Jade Calvin-Nau, 24, Find My helps her remain connected with friends. “People do this sort of indefinite data sharing because it is normalized within their immediate family or friend group,” she said. All of that information can be gleaned from Find My. Friends now, sometimes unwittingly yet obsessively, check one another’s locations and bypass whole conversations - about where somebody is, what they are doing or how their days are going - when socializing. It has changed how friends communicate with one another and blurred lines of privacy.
The impact is particularly noticeable among Generation Z and millennials, the first generations to come of age with the possibility of knowing where their peers are at all times. Her friend later relabeled the apartment building in the app: “None of your business.”Īs location sharing through apps like Find My has proliferated in recent years, they have become a staple in some friendships - ostensibly for safety but with the side effect of complicating dynamics between friends. Pierre would not have known about the relationship until months later. He had started dating somebody, and he was at her apartment. Pierre, 23, zoomed in to inspect the building, then texted her friend its address, along with a joking “where are you?” Her friend came clean.
In July, Shay Pierre opened Apple’s location-sharing app Find My and noticed a friend at an unfamiliar apartment building in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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