The Unintended Consequences Of Tracking Loved Ones' Phones

Is the enhanced sense of certainty - or control - worth the creepiness and loss of trust? JL

Joanna Stern reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Welcome to the world of location-sharing apps. These services, like Apple’s or Google Maps, plot your phone’s real-time whereabouts on a map visible to whomever you choose. Creepy? Sure is! Yet also comforting, at least sometimes. Each legitimate, socially rewarding reason to use them is met with a privacy or anxiety-inducing worry. We’re giving up our sense of personal privacy for slight peace of mind. “This is about trust, when you are allowing someone that level of information, it takes away individual agency. “We attribute causality to everything. We make up a narrative because that’s how we navigate the world.”
It’s 10 p.m. and I know exactly where my family is—or at least where they’re plotted on a map. My sister is safely in the kitchen of her house. My wife? Turning the southwest corner of the park walking the dog. My father is in the … lake? Technical glitch. Phew! He’s on the deck.
Just call me Big Mother. (Actually, please don’t.)

Welcome to the world of location-sharing apps. These services, like Apple’s Find My Friends or Google Maps location sharing, plot your phone’s real-time whereabouts on a map visible to whomever you choose. Creepy? Sure is! Yet also comforting, at least sometimes.
These services are most popular with parents looking to keep tabs on their tweens or teenagers. Life360, one of the most popular apps for families, has more than 23 million monthly active users. But much to my surprise, these apps have also become popular among groups of older friends and family members.
Mikalia McLane works in emergency services in Seattle and tracks 60 (yes, six-zero!) of her friends and family members with Find My Friends on her iPhone.
“With my job, I know emergency info before it is released. On a Friday night, if I know there is a shooting in a bar scene area, I will check to make sure none of my friends are in the area,” she told me. “I can’t give them any info, but I can tell them to not go to that area.”
Jon Kasbe, a traveling filmmaker, follows nearly 100 people around the world. When Jon first showed me his populated app a few weeks ago, I was entirely creeped out. Then I tried it myself, with five important people in my life.
I quickly saw the appeal—and the danger. What occurred while testing Apple’s Find My Friends, Google Maps location sharing and Life360 is what I call the Great Location-Sharing Debate: Each legitimate, socially rewarding reason to use them is met with a privacy or anxiety-inducing worry. And while there’s reason to use these for safety, they won’t give you the full picture in emergency situations.

Point 1: They’re good for meeting up.

Say goodbye to the annoying meetup text-message chain: “I’ll be there in five min.” “I’m standing by the green and white sign—not the white and green sign!” Whether you’re meeting at a Taylor Swift concert or a water park, the apps are great at pinpointing your outdoor location. Indoor locations are tougher.
Find My Friends and Google Maps let you limit how long you share your location. For instance, I was meeting a friend in the city, so I decided to share my location for just an hour.
Find My Friends offers sharing for an hour or until the end of the day. (You can easily access this right from your iPhone’s Messages window, too. Tap the contact at the top, then Info, then Share My Location.) Google lets you share for a specific amount of hours or days. Targeted at families, Life360 doesn’t have limited-time options. You can stop sharing your location at any time in any of these apps. Sharing doesn’t always have to be a two-way street, either. You can share your location but you don’t have to follow someone else’s.
Counterpoint: We’re freaked out when tech companies track and leak our location data. These apps give us a lot of control when it comes to location sharing with others, but don’t forget your constant stream of location data also goes to the app’s makers.
My most important privacy findings: Apple is the best choice. The company collects the smallest amount of info, storing your location for only two hours on its own servers. Google, on the other hand, requires you turn on Location History, a setting that collects and stores all your location data until you delete it. Life360, similarly, requires some serious data collection. (See below for details on all of the privacy trade-offs.)

Point 2: They’re good for easing your anxiety.

When you share your location indefinitely—that is, 24/7—it opens up another level of information.
Bryan Siegel of Riverside, Calif., gets notifications through Find My Friends every day when his 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son leave school and walk home.
“One day I realized my daughter stopped walking. I called her and she told me the police are at the corner and that some guy tried to abduct a girl from school. I immediately went over there,” Mr. Siegel said.
Many teens and 20-somethings track their roommates, sorority sisters and other friends to make sure they get home safely.
I’ve been doing something similar over the past few evenings with my wife when she walks the dog. She does the same for me. A few days ago, I was driving and she saw I’d be home soon, so she unlocked the door and warmed up dinner.
Counterpoint: I joked about that Find My Friends glitch that dumped my dad in the lake, but when I first saw it, I worried he was in a boating accident. (When you open Find My Friends, the app can take a few seconds to replot the person’s whereabouts.) When the tech doesn’t work right or when people say one thing but their location says another, the anxiety follows quickly.
“We attribute causality to everything. We make up a narrative because that’s how we navigate the world,” says Pamela B. Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center in Newport Beach, Calif.
There’s also the argument that we’re basically giving up our entire sense of personal privacy for slight peace of mind. “This is fundamentally about trust, when you are allowing someone that level of that information, it does take away your individual agency. You have to talk about what it is for,” Dr. Rutledge says.
Also, the FOMO when you see two friends hanging out without you? It cuts deep.

Point 3: They’re good for emergency situations.

When Lauren Goodman, 19, heard about the shooting at a Walmart in El Paso earlier this month, the University of Texas at Austin sophomore immediately pulled up Find My Friends to make sure none of her loved ones were there. “I was relieved when I saw they were back at home,” she said.
Many parents also opt to use these features when their children start to drive. Life360, specifically, can detect crashes and report other driving situations. When the app is open, Life360 refreshes location about every three seconds. When open, Find My Friends refreshes every minute, though when iOS 13 comes out this fall—and the app is renamed simply Find My—refresh will drop to 30 seconds. In Google Maps, location is refreshed only when you view a friend’s location.
This past June one anxious mom used Find My Friends to look for her teenage daughter when she had missed curfew. She tracked the phone about 20 yards off the side of a tree-covered embankment, where the teenager had gotten into a car accident and had been trapped for almost seven hours. (The family confirmed the story but declined to comment.)
Counterpoint: In that case, location helped in an emergency but location doesn’t tell the full story. In an age of mass shootings, you’d likely want more info than just where someone is when news reports hit.
Something I wish these apps had is a way to quickly alert those who follow you that you’re OK. Apple gets halfway there with SOS. The feature sends automatic text messages containing your location to your emergency contacts whenever you make an emergency SOS call. Google Maps has a crisis alert feature. If there is an emergency near you, a card might pop up, letting you share your location with others.
I don’t plan to build a list of 100 people to track, but I plan to keep my closest friends and family under surveillance. They can always turn off location sharing, but if my dad does he better be wearing a personal flotation device at all times.

Pitting Protection vs. Privacy

A breakdown of these services’ privacy policies.

• Find My Friends—Apple collects the least amount of information. The location data is encrypted and sent to Apple, where it’s stored for two hours, then deleted. Apple doesn’t use the data to target advertising.
• Google Maps location sharing—Google requires that you turn on Location History to use this feature. A stored list of every area you visit, Google says it’s used to make its products more personalized and to target more relevant ads. A Google spokeswoman explained that there’s a technical reason these settings are linked. She also said that users can delete the data. Google recently launched an auto-delete feature in which you can limit how long you want your activity and location data to be saved.
• Life360—Life360 stores location information for analytical purposes and to support its history feature, which allows you to see where someone has been. The company’s privacy policy says location data can be used for marketing and advertising, and that it may share this data with third parties, including companies that provide drive-tracking features. The company will update its privacy policy in September, and will allow users to have more control of their data.