Why Gen Z is Addicted to Location Sharing |
One recent afternoon, I was grabbing a matcha near my apartment when my phone buzzed with a text from a friend. “Is that a new café you’re at?” I laughed, the way you might when something is both funny and a little unnerving. I didn’t have to wonder how she knew where I was. Like 14 other people in my contacts, she can track my exact location at all times—just as I can track hers, along with those of my friends, roommates and old acquaintances.
I’m 22 years old and, among my peers, it’s become not only routine to keep tabs on our friends’ locations, but expected. Apple’s Find My Phone app, Snapchat’s Snap Map and Instagram’s location features allow us to share where we are at any moment, with whomever we choose. In the process, they’ve changed how we understand trust and privacy, normalizing surveillance-like behaviour that feels straight out of 1984—only Big Brother isn’t the government, but our friends. In a survey conducted this September by digital security company All About Cookies, 75 per cent of Gen Z respondents said they enabled location sharing on their phones.
Surveillance has become our default mode. You know you’re in a deep, committed relationship when someone pops the big question: share your location? My boyfriend and I share ours on Snapchat, and I’m not even really sure why. It could be because TikTok convinced us it’s what serious couples do—#relationshiprules posts frequently list location sharing as non-negotiable.
This habit didn’t come out of nowhere. On Foursquare, an app popular in the mid-2010s, users could tag themselves at specific locations. And people have casually tagged locations on Instagram for years—a bar, a restaurant or a beach halfway around the world. This is meant to brag about status, or to connect through shared places. Eventually, it became normal,........