Find My Privacy

After an especially late night two weeks into freshman year, I stumbled back to my dorm with a few friends. They made sure I got back safe. I woke up the next morning with a hazy recollection of the night. A notification on my phone read that my friend “Started Sharing Their Location with You.” I clicked on the link and saw a tiny dot on a map denoting my friend’s location in the app Find My. I was taken aback.

Though I shared my location with friends on Snapchat in high school, this felt different. Back then, Snapchat only shared my location when I was using the app; Find My broadcasted my location to my friends constantly, even when I closed the app or my phone ran out of battery.

So, for the next week, I curiously monitored my friend’s profile as they traveled to Berg for lunch, boarded the bus to the Science and Engineering Complex for computer science, and attended a party on Friday night. It felt like voyeurism in the digital age — eerie, intimate, and startlingly addictive. By the end of the week, I had shared my location with five of my friends. Collecting locations became a fun game.

“Find My” has become part of the college social experience. Instead of simply calling a friend and asking them “where are you, and what are you doing,” people simply check their friends’ location with a few swipes, knowing their whereabouts 24/7. Being friends with someone has quickly become intertwined with surrendering your privacy to them. But what does it mean when friendships become predicated upon knowing where someone is at all times?

Phrases like “let me share my location with you” signal trust, an integral part of the transition from friendship to best-friendship, similar to requesting someone with your spam social media account or adding someone to your close friends list. Conversely, when someone stops sharing their location or doesn’t share their location back, it oddly feels like a falling out.

Beyond marking a symbol of friendship statuses, Find My adds a layer of convenience when it comes to making plans. Stalking your friends on Find My allows one to easily know which of their roommates is back in the dorm, who’s free to grab dinner at 7:30, who’s busy with their classes at the moment, who to say hi to at the library, who’s at which party, and who’s safely back in their dorms after a late night out.

During one writers’ meeting, I received a text from a friend: “Guess where I am! The Crimson! And so are you!” She had noticed that our circles had overlapped at 14 Plympton St. on the app. I hadn’t seen the friend for a while, and her text prompted me to look for her. We quickly caught up and chatted about our lives. It was great.

In some ways, it makes perfect sense for college students in particular to use Find My so heavily. While high school students can easily see their friends during class or lunch every day, college students have to make a conscious effort to text someone, “Do you want to grab lunch?” The vastness of college campuses, the business of schedules, and the increasing emphasis on individualism means that college freshmen feel especially ungrounded and disoriented as they transition from high school.

In some ways, the need to constantly share locations stems from a sense of insecurity. At the beginning of the school year, my decisions to pull up to Cabot Library became dependent on how many friends were already there. With the app, you don’t have to feel FOMO. You can never be excluded.

But at other times, the notion that all your friends know where you are and what you are doing feels unsettling — almost dystopian. Watchful eyes track your every move. I remember telling my friends that I was on my way just after waking up. Two minutes later, I received a text: “I know full well you’re still in your pajamas. Open the door, I’m outside your room.”

In another instance, I was soliciting advice from a friend when I heard a knock on the door. Even before I opened the door, I knew our mutual friend — who could see both of our locations on Find My — would be standing outside. These unannounced surprise visits, though sweet, occasionally felt suffocating. I could never truly disappear for a second.

Even when I’m back home with my parents, I know that my friends can easily see the neighborhood, the street I live on, and at extremes, even look up how much my house is worth on Zillow if they wanted to.

But the concept of location sharing isn’t new. Founded in 2008, Life360 is an app designed for parents to check-in on their kids 24/7. When Apple first rolled out Find My Friends in 2011, they marketed it to parents who wanted to keep an eye on their children. In 2019, after Apple consolidated all its location-sharing services into one app, teenagers quickly began using it to check in on their friends en masse. In 2014, only 7 percent of U.S. adults said they shared their location with friends. By 2022, 69 percent of Gen Z, 77 percent of millennials, and 62 percent of all U.S. adults shared their locations at least sometimes. Location sharing was no longer just a tool for family safety. It became a social activity in itself.

At a time when college students are expected to grow into independent adults, relinquishing a part of our privacy through Find My seemed to be a step back into adolescence, when teens shared their locations with overbearing parents. Yet when I spoke to several of my friends about my concerns, most did not seem particularly bothered by the app. Responses ranged from “at first I found it weird, but I’ve gotten used to it” to “the app does its job” to “I love it — I love stalking people. I’m always on Find My.” In a world where we cede information to large corporations, sharing our location with friends has become normalized.

In the digital age, Find My is a symptom of a broader phenomenon signaling the erosion of personal boundaries and the loss of privacy.

As an experiment for this article, I turned off my location on Find My for one day. Chaos ensued.

At 12:30 a.m., I opened my phone to five frantic texts in a row.

“Girl, are you alright?” it read. “Your location is off.” My friends called, and my livelihood and safety were questioned.

All I was doing was munching on a bag of chips and listening to sappy Chinese songs.

—Staff writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.