Location Sharing With Geotags Are A Way Of Life With Our Friends Were in an age of apps where it is no longer the format of Im selectively sharing what I want to, but sharing whatever possible. Apps That Tell You Your Friends' Locations Are Now A Way Of Life.
It took a few weeks before Elise, 21, discovered she could look at her metadata by tapping on the three dots on her BeReal posts (a UX designers oversight?).
She could then see how many retakes were taken, how many comments and reaction photos she got, and the precise geolocation where the photo was snapped.
Once you know all this information is there, its fairly easy to deactivate the map.
Elise hasnt bothered.
The truth is, she said she has nothing to hide.
Since the advent of geolocation-sharing tools like Snap Map and Find My Friends in the 2010s, ambiently tracking the location of friends and family is so normalized within certain social circles that some people report never not knowing where their contacts are.
Daniel, 26, thinks of Find My Friends as a quality of life improvement and has successfully converted even his most resistant friends into users.
If I met you at a party, I would be so fine giving you my location.
I see it as a badge of pride that I have nothing to hide, he said.
I wish I had the location of every single person Ive ever met. His boomer-generation parents, however, scream at him whenever he mentions it, so horrified by his disregard for the hallowed concept of privacy.
Destini, 29, is always checking where her best friend is not in a creepy way but as a courtesy. If shes at work, Destini wont bother her with trivial texts.
Ben, 30, turns his location-sharing on and off frequently.
I should be allowed to drop in and out of it, and my friends respect that.
They can joke about where I am when I go dark, he said.
The compromise is that he has to intentionally stop sharing. Categorizing a hangout as clandestine is one more form of preconceived socializing.
These apps, but BeReal in particular, have a forced participation aspect, said Andrew Selepak, PhD, a mass communications professor at the University of Florida.
It is no longer the format of Im selectively sharing what I want to, but sharing whatever possible. BeReal instituted itself as yet another platform necessary for having a social life.
Designed as an authentic, filterless alternative to the shopping-mall catwalk of Instagram, the two-year-old French app feels closer to early grams of morning coffee, Mayfair filter on.
Though there is a distinct difference between now and 2011.
BeReal capitalizes on the knowledge that were on our phones all the time, and the proof is that a daily push notification with two minutes to photograph yourself and your immediate surroundings works so well that excessive glitches dont deter.
In July, BeReal spent three days as the App Stores No.
1 free app and is at 20 million downloads by conservative estimates.
Snapchats live map function debuted a few months before 2017s Hurricane Harvey, when it communicated the breadth of the disaster better than a slickly produced cable news broadcast ever could, according to Wired.
In 2020, developers brought Snap Map to the forefront of the app, and since then, engagement has grown by more than 50 million users monthly, a spokesperson for the company said.
The 4month premium version that launched this July makes it possible to see a ghost trail of where someone or at least their phone has traveled in the past 24 hours.
It has inspired hundreds of beware of this new feature TikToks.
But the growing user base is a young set.
The other prominent social GPS tool not including the IRL game of geocaching that had a moment in the 2010s is Find My Friends, launched in the iPhone 4s era as a way to share ones location with four people at a time.
When it debuted, location sharing automatically expired at the end of each day, but soon after came indefinite sharing.
Three years ago, Apple merged Find My Friends and Find My iPhone into one catchall: Find My. The streamlined ability to toggle between the whereabouts of your work laptop and your work wife could signal that within this experience, at least, people are their devices, or that they only exist when accompanying them.
Its hard to remember that the tracker is not (yet) a chip lodged in the skin but is something unattached and external, operating on a network more precarious than we think.
People are putting their trust in an inanimate object rather than other people, Selepak said.
Ive witnessed it with my 18- to 22-year-old students: unchecked reliance on the technology of phones is destroying interpersonal skills.
Without that practice, they struggle to ask, Hey, are we still eating together later? instead of wondering why the person hasnt reached out, going to check where they are and finding them already at a restaurant, and getting mad.
How did you get there?
Were now assuming the phone has the perfect GPS location of the person and holds the answer to the reason why.
Maybe the GPS location was off by 10 feet, and they were at a shop next door, not eating at all.
The maybes are endless.
Elizabeth Fedrick, PhD, a psychologist in Arizona, thinks that geolocation tools can be insidious in the sense that they can start to create insecurities that arent really there, even in the healthiest of relationships. But she also notes that people with an anxious attachment style are especially prone to jumping to conclusions.
A lot of the research is indicating that an increase in obsessiveness in relationships isnt something natural, but because the tools are there, they suck you in.
Location apps actually increase dopamine because its excitement-seeking, its pleasurable to be on, Fedrick said.
The deepest human desire is to feel accepted and important.
So when you have all these dots all over the place showing how many connections you have, how many people want to share details of their life with you, thats going to play a role in staying on it.