I will never forget what it was like to grow up in the 80s. As a child often I was at some kind of child care. After school programs, or a neighbors house. I remember what it was like, wanting my parents to pick me up. I lived in a place that was surrounded by bullies and abusive religious zealots. Often times I would be staring out the window or looking towards the road wondering when my loving parents would come and get me and take me away from the nightmare situation. Endless hours staring, wondering, hoping. Praying for them to pick me up and take me away.
And that is why I happily allow my wife and my children to track me at all times.
So they will never feel that kind of pain and despair that a young child once felt.
My only location sharing is with my wife. It is very useful to check things like how far away she is before getting home so I can start dinner, or seeing if she has left the house yet or can I still text her to ask for her to do something at home.
Location sharing is creepy. It's weird how many people track their partner's movement.
Back when Foursquare was a thing, Brad from Phone Losers of America would do pranks where he calls businesses and has them page someone who had shared their location.
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
I share my location with a couple of people who, 99.9% of the time do not need it but 0.1% of the time it is rather useful.
I do not care if they know where I am, I do not care if they have commentary about my location. I guess if they got weird about it I would turn it off but I could not imagine a situation where that would be true.
It's not "dangerous", I am as unbothered by any consequence of my location being known by them as it is possible to be.
It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information. It is also possible to have relationships with people where you actually don't care about each other's business.
I love location sharing with friends. "Find my Jerry", "Find my Anna" we call it in our friend group. It simplifies logistics, gives us a narrow but fun little window into each others' worlds.
"Is __ on the top of the mountain or waiting in the lift line?" I want my friends to find me, and my friends want to be found by me. It's nice!
I just really wish there was a way to do live and on-request location sharing through Signal.
There's a plugin for OSMand but its based on a modified Telegram client, so...no.
As it is me and my wife share Google Location via maps which mostly fills in cutting out "how far away are you?" messages but it's surprisingly unfeatureful.
What I want is something where I can designate a trusted contact to be able to request an update immediately from my phone or enable live tracking - since sometimes you want to be able to get a moving dot on the map when you know someone else is driving.
"Lighthouses in the sky" was pro-slavery & pro-racism Virginia Senator John Randolph's criticism of John Quincy Adams policy to build astronomical observatories throughout the US. Adams referred to the observatories as "lighthouses of the skies" and Randolph turned the phrase during the Congress of Panama to embarrass Adams. Could be complete coincidence that Dr. Getting used the same phrase, but this time with a productive connotation.
I share my realtime Google Maps location with 30 people, friends, family, people from the internet.
They can see where I am, down to my address, at any given time.
Why not?
The very real upside is that they casually see me while looking at Google Maps and strike up a conversation or invite me somewhere, something that's happened many times.
The article talks about private and public life... but people will go to all the effort to post the very same things their location reveals on social media. Might as well make it real time.
If you're sharing location data with people who would use it to harass you, that seems like a selection issue, not a systemic issue.
Location data is hardly private. Everyone should share theirs with as many interesting people as possible. If only I had done so back in school.
Yeah but can't you just post an announce "i'll be in X for Y days" on SNS like the old way ? It's way nicer and a much more explicit invitation for hangout than an icon on on map ;)
I don't think I even have 30 different people in my contacts list who I've talked to more than once in the past month, let alone that many living close enough to me to casually invite me somewhere because I'm nearby.
Best use for location sharing I can think of is traveling in a convoy of more than one vehicle, when you plan to meet up for lunch somewhere along the way. At least one person in each car shares their location with each other during the trip, so you can tell that car B is 20 minutes away from the restaurant while car A is 30 minutes away, so car B can afford to stop for a bathroom break.
Then you turn off location sharing after the trip, because you don't actually want to share your location with casual acquaintances all the time. At least, I certainly don't.
Amongst my friends I have definitely concluded that the upsides outweigh the downsides. Amongst others, it's very convenient for meeting people. You don't need to look up the address, you just go to their bubble on the map.
It’s perhaps a bit better now, but back when trip-sharing features were first added to third-party mapping and delivery platforms, there was a real tendency to overshare. Many early implementations generated public URLs with sequential or low-entropy IDs that could be guessed or brute-forced. Anyone who knew the pattern could enumerate live or historical “shared trips,” exposing routes, addresses, and other metadata that were never meant to be public.
I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.
I have been eagerly sharing my location with as many people as possible for years. I have not been very discerning about it - and in fact if anyone in this thread wants my location feel free to message me on signal (drex.64) and I'll share on google maps. No need to share back (though I don't mind)!
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.
A simple fix for this “passive creepiness” would be to have a setting like “share location with Alice, but only when she asks” or at least “Location shared with Alice (last checked one hour ago).”
If I share my location with someone, I can’t tell the difference if they’re never looking at it, or if they’re checking it every minute. That’s what makes it creepy for someone to be checking it every minute – the surveilled user doesn’t know.
(Maybe this is already a feature… I’ve never enabled this thing.)
Surveillance erodes trust and has an oppressive effect. This is a key mechanic of the panopticon, i.e. the modern prison, and the constant surveillance of late modern societies amounts to a 'prisonifying' of both private and public spaces.
There is a harsh power imbalance between the corporations mediating that surveillance and the surveilled, since corporations under capitalism aren't reachable through democratic means. At best they're indirectly, abstractly and highly bureaucratically regulated, but usually by a corrupt parlamentarian neo-noblesse using surveillance techniques to gatekeep and reproduce their power.
Half a century ago this was mainly done through probing the public with polls and the like, as pointed out by Baudrillard in his short work In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.
Contemporary surveillance is much more invasive, immediate and relies on evermore sophisticated psychometrics and technologies. To willingly participate and submit to this regime is arguably worse than being a slacker, (in)famously studied in a paper by Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti.
I have location shared with a dozen or so of my friends. It has many times been useful to find out that we happen to be near each other and end up hanging out.
26 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadAnd that is why I happily allow my wife and my children to track me at all times.
So they will never feel that kind of pain and despair that a young child once felt.
What kind of police station maintains business hours?
Back when Foursquare was a thing, Brad from Phone Losers of America would do pranks where he calls businesses and has them page someone who had shared their location.
"Even"? Historically no such demarcation existed. Often it still doesn't. Compare the commentary at https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/... :
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
I do not care if they know where I am, I do not care if they have commentary about my location. I guess if they got weird about it I would turn it off but I could not imagine a situation where that would be true.
It's not "dangerous", I am as unbothered by any consequence of my location being known by them as it is possible to be.
It is entirely possible to have actually healthy relationships where people respect having information available to them and not abusing that information. It is also possible to have relationships with people where you actually don't care about each other's business.
"Is __ on the top of the mountain or waiting in the lift line?" I want my friends to find me, and my friends want to be found by me. It's nice!
There's a plugin for OSMand but its based on a modified Telegram client, so...no.
As it is me and my wife share Google Location via maps which mostly fills in cutting out "how far away are you?" messages but it's surprisingly unfeatureful.
What I want is something where I can designate a trusted contact to be able to request an update immediately from my phone or enable live tracking - since sometimes you want to be able to get a moving dot on the map when you know someone else is driving.
They can see where I am, down to my address, at any given time.
Why not?
The very real upside is that they casually see me while looking at Google Maps and strike up a conversation or invite me somewhere, something that's happened many times.
The article talks about private and public life... but people will go to all the effort to post the very same things their location reveals on social media. Might as well make it real time.
If you're sharing location data with people who would use it to harass you, that seems like a selection issue, not a systemic issue.
Location data is hardly private. Everyone should share theirs with as many interesting people as possible. If only I had done so back in school.
Then you turn off location sharing after the trip, because you don't actually want to share your location with casual acquaintances all the time. At least, I certainly don't.
I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.
https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/ https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.
If I share my location with someone, I can’t tell the difference if they’re never looking at it, or if they’re checking it every minute. That’s what makes it creepy for someone to be checking it every minute – the surveilled user doesn’t know.
(Maybe this is already a feature… I’ve never enabled this thing.)
There is a harsh power imbalance between the corporations mediating that surveillance and the surveilled, since corporations under capitalism aren't reachable through democratic means. At best they're indirectly, abstractly and highly bureaucratically regulated, but usually by a corrupt parlamentarian neo-noblesse using surveillance techniques to gatekeep and reproduce their power.
Half a century ago this was mainly done through probing the public with polls and the like, as pointed out by Baudrillard in his short work In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Silent_Ma...
Contemporary surveillance is much more invasive, immediate and relies on evermore sophisticated psychometrics and technologies. To willingly participate and submit to this regime is arguably worse than being a slacker, (in)famously studied in a paper by Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti.
http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_perett...
Except one time when doing some airsoft-equivalent and it was used to locate me.