For many iPhone users, the introduction to the Find My Friends app began as pure safety or convenience. Perhaps you shared your location with a close friend at 3am on the way home from a party, or with your partner to help find each other when meeting at the park. You may have even started using it to track your luggage with an AirTag, after Apple merged their device- and friend-locating applications into one single app — called Find My — back in 2019. But as many continue to share their location with more friends and checking in more often themselves, the tracking app can take on a whole new role in modern relationships. With people openly admitting to keeping track of their friend’s locations multiple times a day, Find My has become an unexpected social media app in its own right.
Marisa Lopez, a 23-year-old front desk agent at a hotel, uses Find My more than any other app on her phone. “It’s different than seeing a friend post on social media because it completely leaves it up to the imagination,” she says. “It feels really comforting to see my friends bouncing around the city.” Marisa checks the app “around 20 times” a day, often texting her friends — “I see you at this location” — when she notices them hovering around a bar or restaurant that they both love. This usage resembles Snapchat location sharing, which may have primed us for having our friends watch over our every move.
Marisa is not alone in consistently checking the app. Last year, a tweet from musician Sarah Lugor compared Find My to The Sims. “Just know if u share your location with me, I look at it like social media when I’m bored. ESPECIALLY if we’re about to meet up eventually, because why did you stop at Costco when you said you’d be here in 10 minutes,” she tweeted. While some people are coming out as avid Find My users, the reality is many of us are sharing our location with friends without asking if they are a “check if you got home safe” user or a “track every moment of your day” user.
Finn Orrell, a 27-year-old musician in London, uses the app to coordinate plans with close friends and keep tabs on those he hasn’t seen in a while. “Mutually sharing your permanent location seems like a sweet gesture to me. There are a couple of people on there that I haven’t spoken to in years, but we still have this odd connection because we can find each other whenever we want,” he says, wondering if those friends then see his location and think of him too.
But the app isn’t all romance and roses, ultimately holding the potential for multiple arguments within a friend group or relationship. Did you lie about being 10 minutes away? Now your friend can cross reference your texts and location. What about telling your friend that you’re staying in while you’re actually visiting a secret hookup? Chances are they’ll have noticed.
Aspen Gengenbacher, a 24-year-old living in Missouri, quit using the app altogether after sharing her location with her best friend. “We started sharing our locations when living together for safety purposes,” she says. “Then she took advantage of the fact that she could see where I was at all times — first to hide that she was hooking up with a married guy we both knew, and then to make sure I was never in the same place as her when she was hanging out with my ex.”
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While sharing your location with friends can ease concerns about living alone or walking home late at night, for many, sharing your every move with people you don’t know well can also come with some very real privacy concerns. The average Londoner is being caught on surveillance cameras more than 300 times a day and artificial intelligence is being used by law enforcement for facial recognition and even predictive policing. With this in mind, we’re not only constantly being watched but willingly engaging in community surveillance at an ever-growing scale. This includes posting strangers on social media without consent.
Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford psychiatrist, author and privacy researcher, says that our love affair with social media has also enabled and legitimised snooping. “Apps that allow us to locate and follow people take the snooping a scary step forward, but the desire is as old as social networking itself,” he says. “We need to educate people about the horrors, psychologically speaking, of living in a post-privacy world.”
He says that ensuring a future with access to digital privacy means changing our own behaviour now. “For all the concern people express about online privacy, only a small percentage actually take advantage of all the privacy features offered by smartphones and social media, but it’s never too late when it comes to doing what we can to protect privacy and personal space.” This, of course, includes removing an ex-partner using the app to track you.
For comedian Esther Povitsky, a privacy breach between her and her friend Benji Aflalo became the inspiration for the TV show Alone Together. “I turned location sharing on on my friend Benji’s phone without him knowing because a lot of the time he would go dark and be non-responsive, and I always wondered where he was going and what he was up to,” she says. “It ended up being really sad (and funny) because he was always home. Like, always. I eventually told him about it and he did not care at all.”
Producer Adam Faze really only checks the app at 1am on a Friday night to see which party he wants to go to. “I’ll decide based on more of my friends being there,” he says. While Tomie Martel, a model based in New York, uses Find My to ease FOMO. “If I have anxiety that I’m not doing anything with my day and see that all my friends are also home, I get less anxiety about hermitting,” she says. Similarly, Noor Elkhaldi, the host of Arab-American Psycho, uses the app to avoid people when she doesn’t want to be seen, but also to see who’s around when she has time to kill. “It feels like The Sims and it’s just fun,” she adds.
It’s unlikely Apple anticipated the many social components of constant Find My usage, but the app has already become a permanent fixture in many friend groups and romantic relationships. So, whether you share your whereabouts with close friends for link-up purposes or use the app simply for safety, one thing’s for sure: some of your friends are checking your location more than you think they do. In fact, maybe you’re checking the app more than you ever thought you would too. If that disturbs you, there are two options. Either be more cautious with your location sharing or simply accept the fate of being a character in someone else’s addictive, real life game of The Sims.