[HN Gopher] The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing
___________________________________________________________________
The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing
Author : FromTheArchives
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-10-05 21:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (joinreboot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (joinreboot.org)
| supportengineer wrote:
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know,
| all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who
| uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.
| lagadu wrote:
| The fascist government won't need you to enable tracking,
| they can have the corporation that makes your OS silently
| gather it and give it to them, or simply have the phone
| carrier do it, again silently to the one carrying the device.
|
| We're already all carrying a tracking device with us,
| willingly.
| leptons wrote:
| The government can also just set up their own cell tracking
| towers, cut out the middleman.
| danudey wrote:
| Or just mandate that the telcos do it and make it illegal
| to tell anyone about it.
| ruined wrote:
| why would they need to do that? that's just how cell
| towers work. the government can and does also buy the
| location data on the market like anyone else.
| leptons wrote:
| And yet they do that all the time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_Stat
| es_...
| david_shaw wrote:
| _> i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you
| know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist
| government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd._
|
| The phones (GPS) and cell networks (towers) have your
| location anyway. The article -- and what the parent comment
| was talking about -- is social location sharing.
|
| Although citizen tracking is a valid concern, turning on
| "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more
| vulnerable.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| IIRC some of the social location sharing options have sold
| data in the past, eg Life 360 (I think they still sell data
| but claim that they've started making it
| aggregated/anonymous)
| stavros wrote:
| I have location services off, so at least my phone doesn't
| usually have my location, and neither does Google.
| lazide wrote:
| That is wildly optimistic.
| svachalek wrote:
| There are still various Google processes that likely
| still gather your location, and certainly your phone
| carrier does.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't think Google does if location services are off.
| xethos wrote:
| I wouldn't trust that. Google considered that an app-
| level setting previously, not a choice the user made to
| deny location data to Google. That kind of attitude is
| likely to have seeped into the organization, and "We know
| better" / "The user expects location to work for this
| even with GPS off" is quite likely still the prevailing
| attitude.
|
| At the very least, trust is hard to gain and easy to
| lose. Google has lost my trust, and assumptions of good
| faith have evaporated.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/14/google
| -lo...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37523992
| fsflover wrote:
| > turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any
| more vulnerable
|
| There's definitely a huge difference between actively
| sending your location to a third party all the time and
| passive, often illegal data collection by the cell towers
| that can be stopped whenever you need by switching off the
| modem.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Why not only letting them track you when you're going to pick
| them up, or better when they ask you to?
| dgunay wrote:
| In addition to the other arguments presented here, I have
| 24/7 location sharing enabled with my wife so that neither of
| us has to actively remember to check our phones all the time.
| And if it's potentially an emergency, it is still active if
| one of us is incapacitated.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Or.. just messaging when you're on your way?
|
| And not leaving them in abusive situations?
|
| I'm actually not opposed to direct location sharing among
| one's loved ones, but I don't think being in terrible
| situations and praying for your parents to remove you from
| them is a good argument in favour of location sharing.
| z0r wrote:
| Would your parents have picked you up if real time location
| sharing existed? I understand your story is emotional and
| personal, but using it as an argument why you want to share
| your location at all times is a bit of a non-sequitur.
| supportengineer wrote:
| It was more about not knowing where they were, or when they
| were coming. With technology, children can always know where
| their parents are, not to mention they are only one text or
| call away.
| m-s-y wrote:
| The article's first narrative revolves around a phone being held
| captive in a police station for days because the station was
| closed for the weekend?
|
| What kind of police station maintains business hours?
| pulvinar wrote:
| In US cities they have substations and neighborhood stations.
| I'd guess one of those.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > What kind of police station maintains business hours?
|
| The police station having business hours is normal in my
| country and several other countries that I know of.
|
| If you have an emergency the police will come of course. The
| patrolling and emergency response is separate from the business
| hours of the station.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I believe this is true in my little town in the US as well.
| Nothing out of the ordinary at all.
|
| With that said, I'm reasonably certain even our town has open
| hours on the weekend...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >What kind of police station maintains business hours?
|
| "Sorry, retrieving property is Sgt SoAndSo's job, come back
| when he's here, which <checks schedule> is 2-10am Tuesday."
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| More rural areas
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| iamnothere wrote:
| My location sharing with my partner is a Signal message. "On my
| way home!" Works great, hasn't failed yet. And I can still make
| it a surprise, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?
| bckr wrote:
| You're both doing what you want, which I find awesome.
| nkrisc wrote:
| My location sharing with my partner is a sudden appearance.
| "Hello, I'm here!" Works great, hasn't failed yet. And I can
| still just not show up, which is nice. Keeps things fresh,
| you know?
| cortesoft wrote:
| We often send those, but sometimes we are busy or traffic is
| worse than normal. I don't want to text to ask where she is,
| because she might be driving and I don't want to distract
| her.
|
| When you have two young kids, surprises aren't usually on the
| table. We need to know when things are happening.
|
| I also like having the feature in case she is in an accident
| or something.
| noduerme wrote:
| About a year ago, I started sharing location with my
| girlfriend. In general I hated the idea and I'd sworn I'd never
| do it in previous relationships. But she lives about 20 minutes
| away, and she convinced me it would be nice for the reasons you
| outlined.
|
| I could write a book about this, but to sum it up: It lasted
| about six months. I felt somewhat too _watched_ and I started
| changing my behavior. Instead of texts like "what are you up
| to?" she would send texts like "how many drinks have you had?"
| Or we'd just stop checking in with each other by text, because
| we could just see where the other one was. It felt weird to ask
| "where'd you go after work?" when obviously I already knew the
| answer. At the same time, I also got a bit too obsessed with
| checking on her. I started watching for long periods, which got
| me noticing irregularities. Sometimes at home, her position
| would move every minute or two, and sometimes it would just
| stay stuck. Sometimes it showed her battery level and other
| times not. I started thinking she was spoofing her location.
| Then I started thinking she'd convinced me to share locations
| _so that she could spoof hers_ as an alibi. Once, her location
| jumped to a residential street a mile away from her apartment
| and then jumped back ten minutes later. Convinced she was
| cheating on me, I started spoofing _my_ location and driving by
| to see if her car was at home.
|
| Finally, I showed her the screenshot of the jump and accused
| her of cheating. Having mostly lost my mind at that point, I
| went ahead and told her that I'd been spoofing my location and
| driving by her place.
|
| She swore up and down she'd never cheat on me, she had no idea
| how to spoof her location, and had no idea what had happened
| with the jump - her only explanation was that she had been
| moving her car to park around the corner.
|
| We were pretty much breaking up. I didn't trust her, she was
| angry that I didn't trust her, and I was angry that she was
| angry.
|
| We do, however, both have very patient communications with each
| other. We sat down and talked over the whole thing. She could
| see why I didn't believe her. I could see why the relationship
| would not work if I couldn't trust her - and by trusting her,
| it had to be somewhat blind. That's the definition of trust.
|
| I also realized that, having started sharing locations only a
| few months into our relationship, I had never _developed_ a
| sense of real trust for her. We hadn 't built that toolkit. Why
| would we need to? This was like an epiphany. I saw that the
| trust I needed to work on had been undermined by this
| technology - and worse, the technology itself was flawed. I
| came to believe that the jump had, in fact, been a glitch.
|
| I was like - I want to make this work, and the only thing I can
| think to try now is to turn location sharing off. So we did.
| And things got a _lot_ better. The last few months have felt
| like a new, much healthier relationship. Now we call each
| other, text each other little notes about what we 're up to,
| what we did when we don't see each other. I trust her a lot
| more than I did before. I have to - there's no choice, other
| than to break up. One concession we made was to switch on RCS
| chat, which neither of us usually use, so we could have read
| receipts. That did more to chill me out than anything.
|
| Anyway, I know this story makes me sound batshit crazy, but all
| I can say is - maybe location sharing works for some people,
| but it's not for everyone.
| fn-mote wrote:
| The story is crazy, but it's real and that's important.
|
| It was good to read the second to last paragraph, the one
| with the discovery that switching off sharing improved trust.
|
| I hope your relationship continues to improve.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This makes sense. My wife and I didn't start sharing our
| locations until we had already developed complete trust in
| each other. It has never caused us any issues, because we
| don't have doubts about our trust.
|
| For us it's just about practicality. We have two kids and are
| busy with things, sometimes it is just easier to check to see
| how close she is rather than text and wait for a response
| (especially if she is driving and I don't want to distract
| her!)
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| Read receipts are just as much of a social anxiety trigger
| for me; "oh they read my message, why haven't they responded"
| or "they read my last few messages, why didn't they read this
| one, am I boring them". I turned those off entirely.
| Sometimes new acquaintances ask me why. I tell them it
| stresses me out and makes me overthink social interactions.
| Most people are amenable to this explanation.
| noduerme wrote:
| Yeah, for me as well. Although for me, it's not because I
| wonder why someone hasn't responded... it's because often
| I'm in the middle of something and don't feel like
| responding right away, and I get overly concerned that the
| other person will think I'm being rude! So I don't use RCS
| with anyone besides my girlfriend. But there's an implicit
| agreement in it that we try to get back to each other
| fairly quickly. Neither of us wants the other to think
| we're up to something sketchy. This helped ease me into our
| new non-tracking reality.
|
| As a side note, one other reason I developed such severe
| distrust along with the location glitches was that
| occasionally some of my SMS texts simply never went through
| to her. This led to a situation where I thought she just
| ignoring them, so I'd just feel kinda shitty and leave her
| alone, until we finally went through our chat thread
| together and realized she'd never gotten them.
| no_time wrote:
| How do you even spoof your location on a modern phone OS?
| xposed module?
| fragmede wrote:
| second phone, but who're you cheating on?
| noduerme wrote:
| Android's developer mode has an option to "Set mock
| location app" so that you can test an app you're building
| that relies on location data. Various spoofing apps take
| advantage of this. On iOS, I don't know.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| > I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing
| irregularities.
|
| This is not normal. Why would you want to do this?
|
| > Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my
| location and driving by to see if her car was at home.
|
| You thought it was more likely that she would have spoofed
| her location to go cheat on you instead of attributing it to
| a tech failure, so you starting lying to her and showed up to
| her place?
|
| I'm surprised she didn't break it off with you because of
| what you did. I'm glad y'all figured it out but there's a lot
| of stuff you need to unpack.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> instead of attributing it to a tech failure
|
| Hah. Here's something even nuttier: AI played a role in
| this as well. I really wanted to attribute it to a tech
| failure. I spent a sleepless night searching through tech
| forums and reddit, trying to figure out the likelihood of a
| location jumping a mile for ten minutes, then back. What I
| found was not reassuring. Another thing I'd noticed was
| that when it jumped back, it gave her exact apartment
| number - whereas normally it said "unnamed road". This also
| seemed impossible.
|
| Then I fed the sequence of events to Gemini, which told me:
|
| _Under the specific conditions you 've described,
| particularly the year-long history of consistently showing
| "Unnamed Road" and the preceding highly anomalous events
| (teleportation), it is extremely unlikely, bordering on
| virtually impossible, that someone's phone would transmit
| "APT 123" unless it was being spoofed._
|
| Under further questioning, Gemini actually said I was
| "grasping at straws".
|
| I admit that spoofing my location so I could drive by her
| apartment was pretty crazy, but I think it may be more
| common than people believe. There are dozens of questions
| on Google's community forums trying to ascertain what
| certain weird location behaviors mean, and tons of reddit
| threads about whether a partner is spoofing their location.
| There's a whole industry of private detectives, car GPS
| trackers, etc.
|
| I just thought it might be useful or interesting to give
| people a window into what it's like to go down this mental
| rabbit hole, where these technologies for sharing can
| actually aggravate a sense of mistrust.
|
| What is or isn't "normal", I don't know. But to me, the
| most _not normal_ part of this story is that I told her
| everything, and I decided that the technology had become a
| barrier to establishing genuine trust. Not even because the
| technology was broken (which didn 't help), but because it
| was a placebo for the more difficult pill of believing
| someone.
| fragmede wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your story! Yeah, it's not for
| everybody. If I was an obsessive teenager when this
| technology existed I'd be pterodactyl-shit crazy. I'm able to
| interact with it in a mostly healthy way these days, after a
| lot of therapy and medication that has to do with me maturing
| as a person and nothing to do with the technology itself. I
| can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd grown up with this
| technology.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Yes totally batshit crazy but in the usual manner of real
| human relationships. Thanks for sharing (your story)!
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| 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.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| I share my location with 10+ people, including my partner. My
| wife and participating friends all know, trust and love each
| other and none of us care if we know where each other are, but
| at times where we are coordinating a plan on the fly FindMy has
| been incredibly useful. If I'm letting weather apps and etc
| know and sell my location to data brokers, letting my inner
| circle see my location isn't that deep.
| twodave wrote:
| I suppose it depends on the context. For some couples there has
| been some past dishonesty, and the location sharing can serve
| as a measure of accountability. That doesn't mean it's always
| monitored (though I've definitely seen some people obsess over
| this to an unhealthy degree), but it helps the one who was
| offended feel more secure and keeps the one who did the
| offending honest.
| lazide wrote:
| Until someone figures out they can leave their phone at their
| desk and do whatever they want, anyway.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Exactly, all location sharing does is give a false sense of
| security. You either trust a partner or you don't.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| That sounds horrible.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Trust that needs to be technologically mediated like that
| isn't trust.
| AngryData wrote:
| If you need location sharing to trust somebody, you would
| probably be better off not being together at all.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| Hard agree. Location sharing and stuff like that is
| addressing a symptom instead of a problem. Just break it
| off if the trust is broken
| al_borland wrote:
| When you said it depends on context, I thought you'd give a
| positive context. Using as a means to try and restore broken
| trust doesn't sound very positive. Plus, if the dishonest one
| knows the cell phone is being tracked, they can work around
| that.
|
| I was thinking of a one person realizing they need some milk,
| so they see their spouse is at the grocery store already, or
| on their way home with one on the way. They can make that
| timely call if it makes sense, and if it doesn't make sense
| based on the location, they can add it to the shopping list.
|
| My sister shares her location with me and I will use it to
| know if it's a good time to call. On Sunday she goes to
| church, but I don't know when. I can check the location and
| see if she's in a church or somewhere else, so I'm not
| calling when she can't answer. I do the same thing with my
| dad, I will generally only call if I see he is at home, so
| I'm not interrupting an event he might be at.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Even [Jane] Jacobs believed that "there must be a clear
| demarcation between what is public space and what is private
| space."
|
| "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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| How the commentary was supposed to support your point was
| unclear. No such demarcation exists because people want some
| amount of privacy in public space? No such demarcation exists
| because a self righteous random person asserted privacy is a
| myth and anyone who disagreed with him lied to themselves at
| least?
|
| I know people who value privacy because they grew up in small
| towns. Traffic cameras are used for surveillance also. And
| another reason people don't like them is a record of pairing
| them with abnormally short yellow lights.
| rmunn wrote:
| > And another reason people don't like them is a record of
| pairing them with abnormally short yellow lights.
|
| This. I heard an anecdote, which I can't prove but I'm sure
| has happened dozens of times in various places, about a guy
| who got a red-light ticket and suspected the yellow light was
| too short. He went back to that intersection and filmed the
| yellow lights, proving that they were shorter than the
| mandated-by-law 3 seconds. (I think state law, I imagine
| different states and countries might have different minima).
| He took that recording to court and got not only his ticket
| thrown out, but (according to the version I heard) all red-
| light tickets produced at that particular intersection.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The National Motorists Association blog used to write about
| that all the time.
|
| (They still might, but their RSS feed has died, so I no
| longer see their posts.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > How the commentary was supposed to support your point was
| unclear.
|
| Jane Jacobs is not at an extreme position on the scale of how
| much importance people assign to privacy.
| esafak wrote:
| > 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.
|
| People ditch those small towns for the city to get away from
| small town busybodies, among other things.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| iamnothere wrote:
| > It is entirely possible to have actually healthy
| relationships where people respect having information available
| to them and not abusing that information
|
| This is true, but it's also possible to not realize your
| relationship is unhealthy until it's too late. Trust should be
| earned, not given, especially with something as sensitive as
| location data. It should be years into a relationship before
| you even consider this unless you have proven yourself to be a
| truly excellent judge of character.
|
| It's also possible to share your location in ways that aren't
| private, allowing intermediaries to get this sensitive
| information and either sell it or better manipulate you using
| targeted ads. Location data can be misused in some pretty
| serious ways, especially if someone wishes you harm, so it's
| best to avoid handing it out if you can avoid it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| People keep saying sensitive, but I cannot think of a single
| thing these friends could possibly do with the information of
| where I am. Is this a mobster movie and they're going to hire
| a hitman? Are they going to follow me around and steal my car
| or break into my house? What exactly is the threat model I'm
| trying to mitigate here?
|
| Why wouldn't I give my mother my location? Because I figure
| it would trigger a series of invasive or annoying
| conversations. That's it, that's the worst thing I can
| imagine, an annoying conversation.
|
| >It's also possible to share your location in ways that
| aren't private
|
| My phone, and Apple already know my location. I'm not
| changing that whether or not I share my location with people.
| iamnothere wrote:
| You're not being creative enough, maybe because you haven't
| run into bad people before. I have known of people who:
|
| * Picked a "friend's" lock when they weren't home and
| looked around the house (I feel like they did more, but
| that's all I know)
|
| * Did various petty acts of vandalism to an ex (stealing
| outdoor plants and decor, throwing glass bottles into the
| yard, that sort of thing)
|
| * Spray painted the car of someone that they didn't like
|
| * Smashed an ex's windshield with a concrete block
|
| And that's just what I can think of from the top of my
| head. These days there's also SWATting and other serious
| forms of harassment.
|
| Location data isn't _required_ for this kind of harassment,
| but it definitely makes it easier to pull off. There are
| plenty of twisted people who get a kick out of hurting
| others, often due to petty reasons like jealousy or injured
| pride. And you may not know what they are capable of until
| you hear about what they've done, after the fact.
|
| This is not to say that you shouldn't trust anyone, but you
| should be judicious with your trust. If you had a safe
| containing $10 million in gold, you probably wouldn't give
| the combination to every single one of your friends. Now
| maybe your 24/7 location data isn't that valuable, but it's
| not worthless. You should consider valuing it more highly.
| aradox66 wrote:
| 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!
| est wrote:
| what are some good solutions to this? proximate location sharing?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Probably just a more fine-grained permissions system. Like
| allowing location to be viewed if your phone hasn't been
| touched in a configured amount of time, or if you're on your
| regular route home from work, or maybe you're specifically
| going out to be social and are fine with friends finding you,
| etc.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| jntun wrote:
| "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.
| fragmede wrote:
| wrong thread?
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| > They can see where I am, down to my address, at any given
| time. Why not?
|
| To avoid some awkward conversations many people would rather
| avoid, I guess?
|
| "You were nearby? Why didn't you attend blah/come say hi/etc.?"
|
| "You're here? Didn't you say you're going to be out of town?"
|
| "What were you out doing at {time/place}?"
|
| etc.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| I do the same thing, just smaller group. Answering the
| questions you're asking just requires candor: I need some me
| time. I wasn't feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
| dataflow wrote:
| > just requires candor: I need some me time. I wasn't
| feeling up to it. Will catch you next time.
|
| Great! You tell them honestly, what could possibly go
| wrong. I'm sure nobody's feelings would be hurt when you
| tell them you weren't feeling like meeting them.
|
| Now next time you drop by and still don't manage to catch
| them for whatever reason. Now your prior "candor" becomes a
| lie -- one that never needed to arise in the first place.
|
| Maybe you enjoy getting yourself into these kinds of
| situations, but hopefully you can understand why others
| might not.
| exe34 wrote:
| they might just have reasonable friends. I personally
| stopped putting up with people who annoy me in 2018 and
| I'm much better off for it.
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| A ton of people have mine and no one has ever given anyone
| shit about it.
|
| It's mostly just 'yooooo I didn't realize you were near X' or
| 'how was Y? I saw it when checking where my buddy was'
|
| Dunno maybe someone's has been messing with me all these
| years and I'm oblivious
| account42 wrote:
| Sounds incredibly creepy.
| Fernicia wrote:
| If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu
| lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a
| Friday night at home, then don't share your location with
| that person.
|
| If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very
| different person to me (and probably OP).
| dataflow wrote:
| > If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an
| impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing
| them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your
| location with that person. If you feel that way about
| everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and
| probably OP).
|
| If you feel these are the only two possibilities, we're
| definitely very different people.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Maybe if you don't lie to people you wouldn't have that
| issue?
| dataflow wrote:
| > Maybe if you don't lie to people you wouldn't have that
| issue?
|
| The heck? Is it that hard for you to imagine these
| occurring without lying? You have X planned, and now your
| plans change to Y. Now you owe everyone whose invitation
| you'd declined an explanation, or they wonder if you're a
| liar. Or I guess if they're like you, they already assumed
| you're a liar.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| But why is potentially explaining a change of plans such
| an issue?
| iamnothere wrote:
| Because having to keep track of who might have noticed
| you on the map--then explaining your choices to them--is
| draining and makes you feel like you can't make a basic
| personal choice without justifying it.
|
| Because sometimes people can be unreasonable. (Bad day,
| drunk, generally difficult personality, etc.) The more
| people you add to your circle, the more you are likely to
| run into this.
|
| Because it's none of their business. You are not owed my
| time just because I'm nearby. That's not a healthy
| boundary to have. Location sharing encourages "boundary
| creep" that forces you to more frequently justify and
| reinforce your personal boundaries, adding friction to
| the relationship.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Then just don't? If it's none of their business then it's
| none of their business, if they're unreasonable then
| that's their problem, if you don't want to justify it
| then just don't?
| iamnothere wrote:
| Or just don't share your location and sidestep the whole
| problem? It's not like you won't be invited to a party
| because you don't share your location 24/7. (If this is
| somehow actually the case then you need new friends.)
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Well that's just going in circles. The question was "Why
| would you share?" and someone gave their list of
| perceived benefits. These were written off on the basis
| of creating a responsibility of explaining yourself to
| everyone. I was only responding to that assertion. But
| you're right, we could just not have this conversation at
| all...
| dataflow wrote:
| > The question was "Why would you share?" and someone
| gave their list of perceived benefits. These were written
| off on the basis of creating a responsibility of
| explaining yourself to everyone.
|
| You seem to have missed a crucial step in the
| conversation.
|
| What happened is that the person listing said benefits
| _explicitly_ asked "Why not?" and so received a response
| answering their question.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Nope, I was responding to one of the Why Not? rationales.
| What I said just now was in response to a complete
| sidestep of the issue, which is something else and
| honestly quite frustrating.
| watwut wrote:
| These seems to be about guilting and pressuring rather then
| lying. That person does not have issue because they lie,
| they have issue because others feel entitled to pressure
| them.
| fragmede wrote:
| The obvious one being your wife noticing you're at your
| mistress' house when you told her you were over at your
| girlfriend's, but outside of that, the problem the people
| that are positive about sharing their location is that it's
| also being abused by the abusive. That's a social problem,
| and not something technology can solve. I share my location
| with people I love and trust and will understand that I was
| busy and had an itinerary I needed to stick to and couldn't
| see them even though I was right next door, and if they ask
| we'll have a conversation about it that isn't awkward. Good
| for me but the problem isn't that I have good people in my
| life that I share this with, but that other people have bad
| people in their lives that they're forced to share it with,
| for whatever reason. I don't have an answer for that.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >Why not?
|
| I'd be fine sharing my location with my immediate family, but
| they refuse it. When they wonder how close I am to being home,
| it isn't supposed to be such a serious thing as to have my
| precise GPS location. It's a reason to think about me or
| message me.
|
| I've come to think that it's one of the many "problems" that
| many people don't actually want to solve, and being so heavily
| connected is taking away some of the "magic" of social behavior
| and replacing it with efficiency.
|
| As a random example, waiting for a date to show up is probably
| more exciting than having a precise read of their location. Or,
| when my parents were visiting, they'd often say they were just
| thinking about how I'd be getting home soon.
|
| The nice thing is that everyone has the ability to decide if
| they want to share their location or not. But even on social
| media, I only reveal my current location when I'm somewhere
| that I'd be open to running into people. Otherwise I
| intentionally wait till I'm somewhere else before posting about
| where I was.
| account42 wrote:
| > As a random example, waiting for a date to show up is
| probably more exciting than having a precise read of their
| location.
|
| You could just copy what delivery companies do: "Only 5 stops
| before you"
| fragmede wrote:
| "Your date's previous date is running long. Please wait
| awkwardly at the restaurant at the table by yourself while
| everyone rolls the dice on whether you got stood up or
| not."
|
| Sounds great!
| obk0943t wrote:
| 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 ;)
| amflare wrote:
| I suspect that they are trying to recreate the experience of
| bumping into someone they know. Since the destruction of
| third-spaces, it is increasingly unlikely that you'll
| serendipitously interact with someone in an unplanned, but
| welcome, social environment. Leaving your location on for
| friends and family in this way signals something close to "If
| you see me, say hi". Whereas announcing "I will be at X for Y
| time" is a bit more heavy handed. And just knowing that isn't
| sufficient to actually act on the information, you still have
| to reach out and plan something unless you are an granular as
| the actual building you are in, which feels weird. It feels a
| little intrusive to constantly be announcing my location.
| Like "Hey! Hey! obk0943t! I'm gonna be in NYC just so you
| know!" If I just left my location on, then /if/ you care, you
| can find out. But if you don't, you are not interrupted with
| the information. Finally, posting leaves a record, whereas
| location sharing is always "right now". Sure, someone can use
| that to construct a timeline, but that takes effort on their
| part (and possibly malice).
| fragmede wrote:
| Modern lives may or may not be more spontaneous (doubtful),
| but not everyone has the same capacity for planning as you
| do. Sometimes I'll randomly find myself 30 miles from home on
| an spontaneous side mission, and would love to drop in on
| friends I don't usually see, if they're around.
| 512312d wrote:
| It will become a systemic issue when sharing is the norm and
| you somehow don't.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| https://taylor.town/find-my
| rmunn wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| A theme park or festival would also be a good one.
|
| In the past we'd always designate a meeting spot if people got
| separated. These days, location sharing can solve that and no
| one is ever really lost.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| It's actually a good use case. However what we usually do is
| decide where to meet/stop and we wait for others to reach and
| until everyone arrives we relax, joke around, munch on
| something or so. If someone is getting too late then we call
| and check and if they're fine and are just getting late then we
| weigh on making fun of them and pulling their legs and
| sometimes actually do that. Stuff like that.
| stevage wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| It's also good for seeing how far away someone is if you are
| waiting for them to meet up.
|
| My sister was chronically late when she was younger. She's
| worked really hard to be better, but still holds a lot of
| baggage from our parents giving her a hard time for most of her
| life. If one of them calls to see how far away she is, she
| loses it, because it feels like an attack, even if it's not.
| Location sharing solves this, as we can see how far out she is
| without the call.
| dfworks wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/
| https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social
| practices around location sharing_
|
| Indeed, such as "don't, tf is wrong with you?" People don't
| need to know where I am at all times. I don't need to know
| where anyone is at all times. Stop normalizing this insane
| practice.
| aeturnum wrote:
| That's certainly one of the options! However I generally
| disagree with your point of view. You are welcome to hold to
| it, but many people already know where you are at all times
| and I suspect if you ask your community they will have little
| reflection on what level of sharing feels appropriate. I
| personally do not want to put the genie all the way back into
| the bottle.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've never once allowed a company like Home Depot to know
| my location with Location Sharing. If their site needs to
| know what store is "my store", then I use zip code
| searching and manually setting the store.
|
| There is no way to prevent cell providers from knowing the
| location of the device connected to their network. We can
| regulate the industry from selling that location. I don't
| necessarily mind allowing law enforcement to learn the
| location of a device with a proper warrant. Them selling
| the data to any interested 3rd party should be banned
| punishable by imprisonment of the the entire C-suite.
|
| Sharing your location with family/friends is not even in
| the same ballpark as sharing with corporate entities. To
| conflate the two in your mind just shows how fucked we've
| allowed ourselves to become. Sharing your location with
| family/friends through social platforms is also not the
| same thing as sharing directly through the devices. Again,
| thinking it is just shows how numb we've become to
| theSocials
| zevon wrote:
| Who might those many people be who know where I am at all
| times?
| aeturnum wrote:
| The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone
| manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The
| cell phone companies (approximately but they can
| triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail
| establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology
| becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.
|
| [1] This one is a little uncertain because it relies on
| tracking bluetooth / wifi radios and you have to do a
| pretty complex setup. Simply establishing presence is
| harder (and ofc the whole thing can be blocked by secure
| operating systems).
| zevon wrote:
| Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's
| services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for
| something the authorities would not agree with, I most
| certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or
| whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or
| something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a
| bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body
| fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever
| else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.
|
| Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want
| people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and
| whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize
| said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.
| Group_B wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I feel like this kind of information can be found out by just
| naturally talking with others. Viewing your friend's and
| family's location all the time is just so unnecessary and
| overkill. If something is wrong, you simply reach out to
| others, they don't need to be actively checking your location
| to determine that. Yeah obviously the exception is crazy
| emergencies, but I think most people would take their chances
| than be this open to location sharing. Kids too make sense.
| Other than that, I don't believe location sharing to this
| degree should be normalized at all.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was
| closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out
| what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people
| obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But
| sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might
| reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have
| corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
| cess11 wrote:
| Under what state are you living, where you can expect it to
| never turn on you? Where corporations aren't exploitative and
| manipulative?
|
| It can't be the US or EU, that's for sure.
|
| I commonly leave the phone behind and switch to cheap walkie-
| talkies to lessen the tracking data I produce without giving up
| the ability to communicate with people nearby but not adjacent.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Nowhere! It is bad that corporations have my location. That's
| why I am trying to get people to think about how they want
| this kind of thing to work.
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Yes, and the solution to the fact that corporations have
| your information is not to give more people your
| information.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so
| it could locate which store I am in.
|
| There is a huge difference between giving Home Depot
| permissions to know your location while you are in a Home Depot
| vs giving Home Depot permissions to know your location 100% of
| the time.
|
| If I was using a Home Depot app and I wanted the app to know my
| location, I would share location data using the "Allow While
| Using App" option instead of the "Always" option. I can't
| imagine a scenario in which I would want Home Depot to a
| continuous stream of my location data.
| ninininino wrote:
| To speak bluntly, I'm not sure you're considering that many
| people want to hide or to be able to hide activities like
| adultery, gambling, prostitution, unhealthy food, spending too
| much time in bars, leaving their wife and kids at home to just
| go park and sit in a parking lot to get away, etc.
|
| When you're mentally or morally or -whatever term you want-
| strong, you might miss that some people have things they want
| to hide that might not be burglary or trespass or murder, but
| nonetheless they don't want to be broadcast to their social
| circle.
|
| Maybe we need a term for the Overton window applied to morality
| (in social terms). If your lifestyle doesn't fit neatly into
| the thickest part of that window, you might object to always on
| location sharing but be unable to honestly and openly admit
| why, leading to people like yourself being puzzled why others
| might be resistant.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I know! I am not sure you are considering that at the moment
| full sharing is the default and, in many cases, not optional.
| It seems like you're under the impression that I want us to
| share location all of the time when I've just said that's too
| much. It's just the option we have at the moment. We need to
| figure out when and how to share location and how to develop
| expectations around when people can know things.
| ninininino wrote:
| I think the issue with
|
| > and how to develop expectations around when people can
| know things
|
| is that most people will become paranoid when their
| romantic partner goes "off grid" at 7pm on a Friday, or
| their spouse on a work trip turns off location on Saturday,
| or their child goes off grid after school one day.
|
| if humans could trust other humans "going dark" then that
| would be great, but it seems so far the only way to be able
| to be offline that is socially acceptable is to be 100%
| offline/unmapped all the time socially.
| aeturnum wrote:
| If you're correct then there's no hope. People will
| realize they can have the data and will take refusal to
| provide it as a proxy for misbehavior. For some that time
| is already here. If we can build alternatives that
| provide important location information in the proper
| circumstances without fully tracking people we can
| advocate for a less dystopian use of the technology.
| watwut wrote:
| Shared location also makes domestic violence much worst and
| much harder to escape from. It is not something exceptional
| or rare.
|
| The other danger with it is a targeted harassment and
| stalker.
|
| Both of these are more common then whatever danger
| corporations represents.
| chatmasta wrote:
| 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.)
| cess11 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| danielhep wrote:
| 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.
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