Do you share your location with your friends?
I recently found myself on the other side of what might be a generational divide:
I was talking with two younger family members, and they were talking about being mildly annoyed at sharing their location with the friends via their phones -- as in they could mutually see where everyone was at any given time.
My husband and I were utterly baffled. Giving friends permanent access to our current locations felt unbelievably invasive.
They felt that way a bit, but they also mentioned that it was a way of keeping up with one another and seeing what people are up to. They'd often see they were at a bar and send the other a text telling them to "enjoy the drinks!" or "have a good time!"
I can kind of understand the appeal of this, especially as a step away from the pressures of social media. Instead of having to take pictures at the bar to put up on Instagram, you can just be at the bar, and if someone thinks that's interesting they can let you know. In a weird way, that does actually feel healthier?
They also said that not sharing your location can be seen kind of negatively -- as being aloof or closed off. This gave me even further ick, because it made it seem like there was a strong social pressure to share (similar to the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument).
So, my question is basically: what's the social landscape of location-sharing like these days? Is what my family members do common, or is that an oddity specific to their friend group? Is it actually a generational thing, or am I overgeneralizing based on my one conversation?
Never in a million years would I give persistent location access to literally anyone. My wife, my parents, my best friend. It seems so unbelievably invasive and creepy. If someone wants to know where I am, they can just ask me and I can choose to tell them or not. If I got a text while I was at a bar from one of my friends saying "enjoy the drinks!", it would feel very ominous and would really weird me out. I can't think of any reason that would be desirable.
While I'm with you on the persistent location access (my wife and I or friends and I have shared temporary location access if one of us was going somewhere unknown with potential risks like meeting a rando from the internet to buy something), this...
...I would find funny as hell as it meant one of my friends saw me at the bar and was being a creeper before coming over to have a drink with me.
Right, also I don’t even know how? I guess I’m old. I have my location turned off in privacy settings unless I’m using maps to go somewhere new.
I thought it was just a thing for parents to use for their kids but I keep seeing relationship posts on Reddit mentioning that they share their location with a spouse and that is just so bananas to me like why would my husband even check that? He certainly does not care about where specifically I am unless its an emergency, that man is off enjoying his own damn hobbies when I’m not home.
I can't stand the privacy implications, but even if I could... running precise location services all day must have an impact on battery. Even 5-10% is too much for a feature I don't care about.
Yeah, I'm not even sure I'd tell my theoretical partner where I am at all times. But it seems like my parents have an app that can be used to look up each other's locations. I got nothing to hide, but I'd rather be asked about where I am/was if curious.
The best compromise I might make is on this is having a GPS in the car. But only because I'm the only one driving it; for this theoretical partner's sake I may question that feature if that wasn't the case.
One single time have i shared my location with my wife. Lasted for probably 10 minutes and even that felt like an invasion so I felt like I had to be very clear that it’s not something I’m okay with leaving on.
It’s shocking how common it is to let everyone see you on «snap map» etc.
Same. I’m not married but I wouldn’t even give a spouse this information. I only share location for limited times like playing Jet Lag’s Hide and Seek or meeting a friend.
Yes. Me, my spouse and kids share location all the time. Not with friends, tho.
But, of course, our situation is a bit different ). Our country at a war with russia, so, location sharing its just one more thing that help us to feel more safe. Especially during air alerts.
My brother and I are 5 years apart over the millennial/Gen Z divide. I would never share my location unless there's a specific reason to whereas my brother has his on all the time with his friends.
Edit: I should specify, my younger brother
I am solidly middle-aged, and I wouldn’t ever do this. Hell no.
Nor would I accept anyone else’s location information, because I genuinely do not care where on God’s green Earth my acquaintances, friends, and family are located. They can just text me the information if it means that much to them.
Honestly, not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, but this behavior strikes me as neurotic. It’s as if too many people have become much too anxious (and mistrustful) about everything overnight; as if too many people have forgotten how to simply disengage, and it is collectively winding us up much too tightly as a whole.
Mystery is one of the great spices of life, and some people seem to be doing everything within their power to scrub their daily experiences of it.
Beautiful, I never seen this before and it really speaks to me.
I can understand some appeal. If you have a hundred or so people in your list you can spin the globe at any time and see where your cohort is. I don’t think that mild amusement is worth it, but I can imagine that small feeling.
Generationally from what I've been told - college students often have it on because parents demand it, but then it also functions as a safety thing (something the women/afab folks are particularly taught and encouraged to do) for their peers, so they know where they're at if they're out. Cutting someone off of your location is a grave social offense and means that you're beefing.
If it's parents it's Life 360 if it's just peers it's usually their Snapchat map, but it can be both.
Parents with this information can be insufferable sometimes.
Personally (elder millennial) I only share my live location with folks when I'm on a trip, or I did if I was on a date back when I had the energy for that. So safety/"arrival time" reasons only. I also don't have an iPhone and was too old to have my parents tracking me by the time that was an option (I got a Nokia brick for my 18th birthday...)
What does beefing mean in this context? Like, "I am angry with you / have some beef with you?"
Kind of sad that overbearing parenting tactics are having a sea change for how the next gen behaves.
Yeah cutting a friend off of your location (without cutting everyone off) means you're pissed at them. It could be part of a bigger argument, it could be deliberately so they don't know where you are, but it's just like unfriending them on social media or blocking them or the like.
I'll say there are perfectly reasonable parents who have access to their student's location but don't really use it on the regular. And then there's "can you do a wellness check and tell me if my kid is in the building?" (Answer: we do the check but don't tell you anything) Or students so afraid of their parents knowing they're out that they leave their phone at home, which isn't safer, even if they're fully sober and literally just picking up a friend in need.
I have had students with parental control apps on their phones, whose parents are logged into their Gmail, who legitimately feared their parent had bugged their room.... And plenty who just share their location with family because they always have.
Yikes things have changed since I was a kid.
I was the odd one out whose parents would call a bunch of times throughout the evening, demanding everyone say hi to them on the phone to verify it's really the friends I say I'm with, and ask them if there are boys etc. if my phone dies they'll call my friends looking for me. It was humiliating because no one else had parents like that.
Recently, I gave some rides to a 20-25 year old, and their parents asked a lot of questions that reminded me of my own. I guess it's become very prevalent nowadays to hover over the kids and assume a very very bad world.
I can understand doing this if your child has a severe medical issue (including addictions). But otherwise this seems like way too much work and stress. I can’t really imagine the mindset here.
Idk stress for me is threatening to fight your student's roommate for calling your student a bitch. I wish I were exaggerating.
So while I find the tracking parents somewhat tiresome when they call staff about it, they tend to chill out some. It's the extreme cases of tracking parents - the I'll pull you out of school, sort - and the, er, other extreme situations like the above that get me.
I'm 41 and hell no. The only person that has permanent access to my location is my wife.
My friends don't need to know where I am (I mean, I'm pretty much at home 100% of the time anyway) and I don't need to know where they are.
I'm 41, and not even my wife and I share persistently. I intend to never force my kid to share location. It's easy enough to do a quick text checkin.
If that's not enough for most people, there is a serious lack of trust. Used to be location tracking was a thing for criminals on house arrest.
I hear people expect texts to be synchronous these days. This is also bonkers to me. If it's that important to be synchronous, call.
My phone is perpetually silenced. The concept of getting alerted for phone calls is dead to me since the entire communication medium is populated by automated calls trying to scam people. I don't think that I am the only one.
Messaging me isn't going to be synchronous, but it is almost assuredly going to be closer to synchronous than a phone call, because the phone call isn't happening.
Every phone these days has the ability to simply send every call that isn't someone in your contacts directly to voicemail.
I tried that for a bit and ended up getting more voicemail overall than ignoring the entire "phone" function of my phone.
On android at least, I leave in Do Not Disturb rather than silence.
Then I allow starred contacts to call with ringer, and anybody can if they call 2x in 15min.
Added bonus it acts as a "Find My Phone" without needing to use Google's spyware.
Fun fact*, it's not even for the home monitoring aka house arrest folks, it's for basically the sex offenders and other high risk offenders (pre-trial threatened a specific location for example).
Most ankle monitors are just reporting Home:Yes/No. Only the special few are GPS. The people that made those ankle bracelets were horrified at the idea of people letting themselves be tracked.
*Not that fun
I actually just had to switch over to Google Messages from using a different third party app and I hate the fact that my friends can see when I'm responding to them and read receipts, etc. Luckily I don't think they care, but still, I don't need anyone that up in my business.
Location tracking for us isn't necessarily anything about trust for us, but just checking in, which I suppose I could see it as a thing in a friendship, but it's still weird. Makes sense to me when you share a relationship with children, for me, but not in any other instance.
You can disable that on google messages if you're referring to RCS features
I leave read receipts on - that way you can see when I've seen a message and inevitably forgotten to reply vs when I'm swamped at work and unable to reply.
I'm 20, so on the other side of the 'generational divide' that people are mentioning, my answer is a horrified "hell no!". However that's not the case with a lot of my peers, it was definitely more of a thing when I was in high school and I've since deleted most of my social media so I don't engage with it much. In my experience, the friend-to-friend location sharing is done through snapchats "snapmap" feature, which shows you where people are when they open the app (it's not live unless the app is open, but it shows how long ago the location was updated).
This is the advertised purpose of the feature, but it actually functions as a FOMO machine. It lets you see who is hanging out without you, so you can imagine what kinds of things you're missing out on. If you post a story, it will show up on the map as well for added envy generation. I'm certain this is all intended behavior, because it was the only way I saw it get used outside of seeing how far away someone is when they're late. I knew of multiple occasions when someone would show up to a party uninvited because they saw a bunch of people in the same spot. It's straight-up evil, and one of the reasons I think snapchat has to be the first social media to go.
This is only kind of true in my experience; if you usually have it on then hiding it from a specific person is a slight against them, but if you just turn it off for everybody then no-one really cares. Not everybody I knew had snapchat, so you couldn't fault them for that either. As far as I recall, you could only use the map if you were broadcasting your location, so you could be insulated (or excluded depending on how you interpret it) from everything if you wanted to be. I had a jail-broken phone for the time I was using snapchat, so I had my location set to the middle of the ocean as a sort of middle-ground.
Now that everyone I know is out of highschool, there's not really any location-sharing going on (at least in my circles). It's considered slightly childish to be still using snapchat in 2025, so I think that everyone is over those features. As for family tracking through life360, I knew multiple people who had it enabled but always thought it was creepy. My family considered it a long time ago, but I refused to turn it on and after some yelling my parents realised it was a bad idea.
It is utterly insane that people have forgotten all the internet safety basics. I'm still scared to give out my instagram (that I don't use) to people that meet in real life!
I don't know anyone who does this regularly. For context, I'm a Millennial. My friends range from mid-20s to late 30s.
I only share location when I'm taking Uber/Lyft, for safety reasons. My brother, even though he's across the country, always gets my Uber location. And I've noticed he sometimes sends me his when he's Ubering.
The other one or two times I've done it was on trips. I've shared location once when I was on an overseas vacation. My uncle recommended our group download and install Life360 in case we get separated or lost. Interestingly, he uses Life360 with his family ALL the time (which is weird since my cousins are all adults in their 20s/30s and one is married and lives out of state). But as soon as we got stateside, my mom, dad, and me uninstalled it. Definitely don't want or need my relatives to know where I'm at.
Another time, a friend and I were trying to meet up sorta in the middle of nowhere, so we shared our locations with each other. But after that, we stopped sharing.
I don't need to know where my friends or family are at all times. Nor do I need to let friends and family know where I'm at. If they need to or should know, I will tell them explicitly, and vice versa. And I live a super mundane life. I imagine 90% of my locations would be at work and or at home.
I wouldn't even consider it (millennial), the only time I run active tracking is to record routes/fitness data on my watch on occasion and even then that's not shared live and mainly for my own usage. Sometimes I share the GPX file for others curious about routes post activity.
I will leave a note (yes, that ancient technology) with a general plan if I'm heading out into the bush, and if I'm on a longer trip I might post a picture of two on the family group chat to keep them somewhat posted on my whereabouts but that's about as far as I go. If I'm really in need of a hand my satellite communicator will share my location along with my messages and is more likely to be of use than the phone given how limited reception gets in many places.
I perma share mine on Find My and on Instagram. When I'm out in public—cafe, bar, gym, art museum or gallery—a nearby friend or acquaintance might see me on the map and swing by, say hi and have a chat, and maybe invite me to plans or on whatever adventure they're on. Sometimes I'll see friends out and about and I'll stop by to say hi.
It makes my life more socially vibrant. It collapses the spatial anonymity of the city into a digital village. I know lots of people who do it.
To be honest I don’t really want even my close friends popping up on me when I’m alone because they saw my location on their phone. It could be funny to run into someone organically though.
I'm a mid-ish millennial and the idea has become normalized for me in the last several years. I'm selective about it and wouldn't share it with a stranger, but a friend who I see regularly? Sure. It's convenient and is a tangible vouch for the trust I have in my friends.
I'm with you in that I don't find it so very strange, and if my closer friends were doing this then I'd probably do it too. That being said it's not something we do or have done and I don't see much value in it so won't lead the charge. (1989 baby)
Chiming in too - I have my location permanently shared with my husband because it's convenient (we both get alerts when either one of us leave work, which is great for dinner-planning purposes. Also, gauging why either of us aren't picking up the phone - e.g. If I need to check on something grocery related, but he's not picking up the phone, I can see he's in the woods nearby and can gauge when he'll be back from walking the dog)
But I wouldn't be that weirded out to see my best friend permanently on my Google maps. I wouldn't share it with acquaintances or anything, nor my parents. but if she asked me to I would probably just shrug and let her.
1993 baby here, husband is from 1981, he feels the same way about us sharing locations but I do know he'd never share his location with anyone other than me lol.
I'm a late millennial (on the cusp of being gen z) and I kinda share my location with friends and family 24/7. I have a Tasker profile set up so that if any of my favorited contacts asks "Where are you?" it automatically gives them my coordinates. Mind, this is like 6 people total. I don't mind them being able to find me any time because I know they'll never abuse it, but I'll toss this phone in a blender before I install an app that gives some marketing firm in San Mateo access to my location 24/7
It also helps that you know that they're asking.
As a Gen X, I think this is insane, but high school age kids I know do seem to think this is pretty normal.
I don't even do that for my family members.
I have an aunt, and her children, my cousins, are both in their 30s. She demands that they keep their location on. The youngest, who still resides with my aunt, can not go out anywhere without her mom calling her and asking where she's going. Like if my cousin takes a different route from her work to home she will get a call from her mom asking where's she's going.
That's insane to me. And I think needing to know where someone is every second of every day is crazy and frankly paranoid. I think people just need to relax, it's like the popularity of true-crime has made everyone lose sight of privacy.
I'm a millennial and no way would I leave it on permanently for people to watch where I am. I don't even have a proper social media presence.
But, I do have friends about my age and some older or younger that share their location permanently with their spouse. So that they know where each other are. Not that they don't trust or that they're sticky or anything. They say it's practical, because they can check where their wife is and if they're close by, they start making dinner. That sort of thing.
I still don't really get it. But some, not a lot, of people around me do it.
I said it in a comment above but essentially this yeah. I share my location permanently with my spouse. I'm 100% certain neither of us have ever used it for anything other than practical purposes. We also get alerts when one of us leave work (option in Google maps) also for 100% practical (dinner related) reasons.
For context, I'm 35 years old.
I've had my location persistently shared with my wife through Google Maps for a long time. My previous career was in public safety, as a firefighter/paramedic in a, uh, somewhat sketchy part of town. If she wasn't getting responses from me, it was a comfort to her to be able to see where I was, and if I was moving around. When fighting fire, everything came out of my pockets prior to dressing out into bunker gear, but otherwise I generally had my phone on me. So running around on a scene, she could see I was moving, and not lying in a ditch on the side of the road hit by a car while working an accident.
I have two issues with this idea.
A) I have an issue with the word "permanent". For close friends and family, I could easily be convinced to share my location occasionally, or even most of the time. But there are gonna be times when I want to turn that off.
However,
B) I have absolutely zero confidence in any current "location sharing" technology, to be able to share my location with only the people I intend to, and not 18M corporate sponsors and partners and govt agencies and etc. At this stage in my life, I do not trust my own router to know my location.
I would never do this permanently, I would do it for specific purposes with specific people. For example, I have done it over the years when meeting up with people during busy events. Specifically where neither is familar with the area, but that's about it.
When I was in college, I went on a student exchange to the US. This was before everyone had cell phones, Skype didn't exist, and the only way to stay in touch was to go to an internet café (remember those?) once a week to write and read emails. I was completely unreachable and uncontrollable for anyone - parents, friends, everybody I knew before that trip, they were all on the other side of the planet with no way to find out what I was doing. I could never have imagined how incredibly liberating it was.
That's when I realized how much pressure comes from the expectations of those around you. And that pressure is so ubiquitous that you don't even notice it under normal circumstances. I still miss that freedom. And I think that many young people today will never experience it.
Oh, hell no! Even my spouse and I don't do that. (FWIW, we're xennials.) If I take longer than expected running errands, for example, a simple "Back soon?" text is plenty. And if I don't answer immediately, it's understood that it's because I'm probably already on the way home and driving. (Besides, I normally keep location services and location history off on my phone, since I'm fairly privacy minded.)
I don't even have location sharing turned on on my teens' phones. I never had that growing up, so I refuse to inflict it on my kids. I'd much rather trust them and not be a helicopter parent until they give me a reason otherwise. My parents trusted me at that age and I survived, so I'll extend that courtesy to my kids in turn.
That said, there've been a couple of times where I've temporarily turned on location services and location sharing remotely (through the Google Family app) when a kid has been way late, hasn't checked in, and hasn't answered calls or texts. But I can count the numbers of times I've had to do that on one hand.
I know a small town Boomer couple that use Life 360 and have a habit of monitoring each other when they're apart. I guess they consider it a form of safety or something. They have little concern for privacy but instead fear about being stabbed or shot
Never been comfortable with it but my wife and I recently turned it on for each other due to convenience. We have a very strong relationship built on implicit trust - we hide nothing from each other, even insane stuff we probably should 😂
For a long time it just didn't matter to share location, nowadays we have a daughter and she works in multiple locations at her current job, so when the baby and I are out on a walk it is helpful for us to know which direction to head if she can't reply right away. I also run all of the errands and give her my "agenda" for the day, so she can check where I am and see if I can take care of something without having to ask where I am, or call, and do the whole song and dance. At least from my end, I would absolutely never check it without a purpose, and I don't really believe she would either. We are both people who have the others best interests in mind in almost all cases. I am incredibly lucky.
I would never persistently share my location with anyone else in the world. Maybe temporarily for specific purposes.
Reading these comments is funny to me!
I’m 26 and yeah, I have some friends who I share my location with, and then also my girlfriend and mom. With my friends, it’s just been something we’ve done since high school ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the main thing I use it for is to be able to check if anyone can get on Counter-Strike :)
Right? Privacy is sadly already faded away. There's 100 other ways companies can find out where my location is. So why not have the convenience of knowing whether or not I can ping my friends to play a game? Or to have comfort that my wife made it to work? Or that I can call up my parents knowing that they won't be busy
Yeah, for me I try to maintain my digital privacy but, in this case, I'm already using Apple's Find My Phone, so this is just giving my location to friends who I don't mind if they know where I am.
Elder millennial and hell no. I'll share my location when I'm meeting up with someone but other than that, absolutely not.
Even for your significant other - why bother? I have friends who do this and I'll never understand why. Safety is the only excuse I can think of and even then.
I would consider installing a safety app where your location gets broadcasted to select contacts under user-specified conditions.
Walking home, and expect it to take 15? At 20 blast location unless I snooze.
Good call - it's something I might put on my kid's phone.
I would consider sharung location with friends when we are somewhere as a group (vacation for example) and just wanted others to keep eye on everyone and know when/if they are coming back (for example).
I'd even understand if youngsters wanted to go out and they switched location sharing right when they went outside the house so that they can easily group together somewhere or see where other group is to meet with them.
All time.location sharing is in my eyes inherently bad. There are (many) times when you just want to be left alone andnot meet up and not be spied on. Sometims you just want to walk through the park alone admiring beauty of nature or read a book lying on the grass. And these are the times when you don't want others to come to you. If you wanted, you coul always share location or just phone them and ask them to go out.
I can see this as an extra easy bullying tool - "You go hat shop only because you are poor" or "You love Jihn because you spend so much time with him" or even worse - someone could really easily stalk you this way. Why make it easy for such people? Everyone should have their privacy and only them should choose how much of it they want exposed.
If such "friends" pointed at me for not sharing my location with them, I wouldn't consider them friends anymore. Someone doing something doesn't mean I must do the same. And if they think otherwise, so be it, I don't need such people in my life.
Was curious after seeing this and asked about it. Turns out my cousin and I are the only ones amongst family and friends that doesn't have a location tracker constantly on. Not a big shocker to anyone since I've got public 0 social media and not a participant on group chats. Also because my wife has hers on share so people can sort of keep track like that. But I've never really felt the need to keep a location on and I'm glad most people trust me enough not to ask.
Its not like its not like I fully disagree. I think there are some people that should be tracked for their own and others safety. Like the elderly or someone with a dangerous behavioural problem. And there are people who need that piece of mind. But on the whole, it just seems like the benefits don't come close to outweighing the risks.
Like even in my worst accident, unless someone was looking at that map 24/7, there is very little they could do to actually help. A paramedic was there as fast as possible, could ID me, find the vehicles insurance and my family was contacted in under an hour of the event. If there was some sort of abduction event, a committed perpetrator will know to dispose of any smart devices away from the scene and double back. The service might actually be more of a risk should a phone/credentials tracking a potential victim be compromised.
And lastly, it just seems like a big point of anxiety for everyone involved. Like turning off a tracker is just going to set off so many needless red flags. So much so that a person who just needs a moment of privacy will be discouraged from doing so and everyone seeing it will instantly be put on edge.
I never heard of it here in Brazil. I talk to young people regularly and they never mentioned something like that.
No, I don't feel comfortable with this level of information - I'm a home body anyway, 95% of the time I'd be within 5 miles of my home. Just call me, I almost always answer.
I feel this may stem from parents demanding location on their kids and then kids extending "family" status to friends and, by proxy, extending location status to them. If I was comfortable with it, I could easily see myself letting my friends know where I'm at. Rather have them come get me out of a jam anyway.
Bad Religion's 21st Century (Digital Boy) released in 1990 but, man, they had no idea what was to come, huh?
32 yo here.
Girlfriend and I shared it with each other for a while. I never liked the idea of doing it when I was still just in one location, but I live all over the world and share it with a few friends. I always love seeing where everyone is. I think I have like 4 friends and then some family members. But I often stop sharing when I’m in my home town.
I'm in my mid-20s and sorta in the middle here.
I don't share my location with friends, unless they're visiting my city/we're traveling to the same city and we want to meet up. It's convenient being able to temporarily share locations with each other and see where we are on the map and converge. I basically set it up to share location for 3-6 hours (I forget how granular you can get) and then once the day is over, my location is private.
I do however share my location with my immediate family. We all use iPhones and I have my location shared with them through Find My. We don't really check each others' locations through it from when I last talked to my family about it. I have checked my brother's location a few times but that's about it. When I lived with my parents, my brother would often spend late nights out with friends and past like 2am, I'd be curious where he was and he wouldn't be responding to my texts. In those situations, I'd briefly check Find My just to see where he is and get some peace of mind.
I don't really have friends, so it's hard for me to weigh in one way or the other on whether I would feel comfortable sharing location information with them. I'd imagine it depends on the culture of the friend group and how close and trusting it is, and that would vary pretty widely even within specific age groups.
But I'm just chiming in to point out that aside from the issue of how you feel about privacy amongst your friends, sharing persistent location is also placing a lot of trust in Google or Apple (or whoever), since in order to share your location with your friends or family it also has to pass through their servers. The big tech corporations haven't exactly done a lot in the way of fostering my trust in their willingness or ability to keep personal data secure. I always just assume it's going to end up in the hands of data brokers and be made available to anyone with enough money (either by being directly sold to them by said big tech corps, or stolen in a data breach). For that reason, regardless of how I'd feel about sharing persistent location with my theoretical friends, I would never do it because I don't want to share it with whoever has enough money to buy it for their own purposes.
I know that the mere act of using a cell phone that connects to cell towers also exposes my persistent location data to various big tech corps, but unfortunately I'm not aware of any way around that one that doesn't involve completely shutting off contact with the outside world. I'll still do whatever I can to at least keep as much of my personal data out of the low-hanging-fruit category by not deliberately handing it over wrapped up with a bow on top.
Yeah. If there's a way to constantly share my location with good friends without big tech profitting, I would. Even if my friends ping me 20 times a day asking for location i would text it to them so that the data is harder to collate. I don't mind sharing, I just don't want to shout it across the room, so to speak.
Case in point, I do turn it on when I'm getting picked up by them or going to their location, so they can track me like a ride share. Or if there's a large crowd (eg convention) we can better coordinate who's nearby and free.
I share mine with my partner and his parents since we sometimes go camping in remote areas, and I commute an hour and a half each way via public transportation to work. I'd rather have it on if something happens. But I can't imagine sharing my location with my friends. It's literally only on so partner and his parents can find out where I was last if I don't come home when expected.
I used to be very much against it, and I still think the default should be no, simply because privacy matters.
I do, however, now share mine via Life360 with my girlfriend and her parents. I can see them as well. I'm not getting any younger, and have had a few health scares, and the thought of someone looking out for me is now more comforting than it was in my invulnerable youth. Her parents are of the age where it's good to keep tabs, too.
If I’m traveling to someone or they’re trying to find me at an event, I’ll share it to them for as long as it’s relevant, otherwise I’d rather not.
I’ll say that when I was in college, I was still a frequent Snapchat user and I did leave Snapchat maps on. For those who haven’t used it, it basically shows where all your friends, who had location on, where on the map with their little Snapchat figures.
Idk, it was fun then. You could kinda casually see where everyone was. I wasn’t really concerned with privacy - I mean we were all in the same places roughly, anyway. College life and all. It was also a bit of a flex when you were out all day and night.
Since then I’ve fallen out of Snapchat - not that Snapchat did anything, I just lost interest over time. But I can see the appeal - I mean, I did use it when I was young-er person.
I’m in my mid-30s and have a friend similar age who always has location on and shared with a few close friends (the kinds of people you’d leave a copy of your house keys with, in case you lose yours or leave them somewhere), but I think explicitly not family.
They added me at some stage when we were trying to meet up and just left it on forever, so whenever we meet up for lunch in the city or whatever, I can see if they’re nearby or still on their way etc. They’re also the kind of person who might get distracted in the middle of typing out a reply to your text message, so location sharing helps their friends get an answer to “are you coming around for dinner” for when my friend forgets to reply.
I’ve occasionally turned on location sharing with them too, but because they use google maps for the sharing, and I’m not a fan of giving google more information about me than I have to, I turn off location permissions once we’ve parted ways again.
For their own friends, it’s convenient, and since they have weekly (or fortnightly?) roleplaying sessions together, they’re already super close and trusting, so the benefits of convenience and I guess also safety far outweigh their privacy concerns.
I don't mind.
I know the location of my spouse, my kids, mom and one sister (other siblings + dad are on Android so...)
I practically never use it though, mostly when I want to call them for chitchat, I can check if they're home so I know not to bother them if they're somewhere else. That's about it.
Sometimes when they're coming to visit, I see how far they are so I can get the coffee ready in time :)
I'd be fine with a boolean "is X at home" location info, but that's not an option with Apple's ecosystem, so we're doing this now.
(Nokia had this like 30 years ago btw, but it was a shit implementation and even shittier marketing and died)
No chance. I don't even use my location for Uber.
Not quite a boomer here. No way would I give persistent access to anyone, not even my own dearest spouse. I've shared location for a limited time so that a visiting friend could find me at the transit center parking lot, that's it.