Which brings us to the more curious kind of location sharing: the ambient, always-on kind. “It was nice to have as a backup,” she told me.īut more than two years later, she’s still sharing her location with them. For instance, Kelsey Ko, a 22-year-old teacher with Teach for America in Baltimore, turned on Find My Friends with the group of women she went to Puerto Rico with for spring break in her sophomore year of college, so that they could find one another if they got separated. This temporary sharing has obvious practical applications, as anyone who’s ever tried to find a friend at a crowded music festival can attest. On Find My Friends, you can notify your friends when you arrive at or leave a certain place-but only if you’ve already shared your location with them beforehand. Many services now allow people to share their location temporarily-you can share for an hour on Facebook Messenger, and Google Maps lets you customize the duration. Read: How friendships change in adulthood This can change the dynamic of friendships in ways both good and bad, both subtle and profound. Though it may seem creepy or unnecessary to some, for others, the ability to constantly track one another is a normalized, even welcome addition to their close relationships. (Swarm, a spin-off of Foursquare, lets users “check in” at certain locations, but doesn’t otherwise broadcast their locations as they move around.) Find My Friends, an Apple app, exists only on iPhones, but Google Maps, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger all have location-sharing integration too. But in recent years, sharing one’s location with friends over smartphones has become the norm for some social groups. This is admittedly a niche use for Find My Friends. “I never want to sing when anyone’s in my house with me.” So before she gets in the shower, she checks the location-sharing app Find My Friends on her phone to see whether her roommates are home, or whether she’s free to belt as loud as she wants. “I don’t sound good,” Mohr, a 20-year-old college junior studying information science at Temple University in Philadelphia, told me. Jennifer Mohr likes to sing in the shower, but she doesn’t want anyone to hear her.
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