Why Are My Friends Tracking Me More Than the CIA?

Monique Guarino

10 hours ago

4 min read

Find My Friends seems well-meaning, but I can’t decide whether it’s unnecessary surveillance or just performative community. I am baffled by how normalised it is to share your location with your friends at all times. Many will say, “Well, what are you hiding?” The answer is: nothing… but also maybe everything?

Why do my friends need to know when I’m at home or the grocery store? What value does that add to anyone’s life? It’s quite intrusive to think my friends could check where I am at any moment. As I said, I have nothing to hide; if I’m available and you ask me what I’m up to, I’ll tell you. But why are you so desperate to know at any given moment?

Could it be rooted in how disconnected we are? Our busy lives are stopping us from connecting face-to-face. A modern way of feigning closeness. A metric for measuring the depth of a relationship because it essentially means there are no secrets. But if you need my whereabouts at the drop of a hat, are we really that close, or is that just an anxious attachment style?

American data shows the average person spends 45 minutes socialising in person daily. Compare that with our six and a half hours of daily screen time… something feels off here. As our screen time climbs, our in-person socialising declines. It is no surprise that society is grasping at straws to maintain a sense of community.

A smorgasbord of options exists to “stay connected”: Instagram Stories and Close Friends, photo dumps, Find My Friends, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok, Goodreads and, for God’s sake, even Strava. Alarmingly, my best friend was recently DM'd on Spotify?

My theory is that this could be an attempt to banish FOMO. Checking that your friends are constantly doing something as banal as you are. More often than not, they are just doing the mundane, and it can be soothing to know that the dazzling life on Insta or TikTok is really just for the cameras.

Which leads me to the next reason why I don’t like being tracked: what do we talk about if you already know what my week looked like?

Sure, “catch-up culture” is ruining friendships, but an update peppered with stories from the week is an important social ritual that lays the foundations on which we build and maintain relationships. Especially now, when hordes of people have access to our lives, sharing small inconveniences and joys is social currency.

More than ever, we are privy to what our friends (and complete randoms) are doing, when they’re doing it, who they are with and when they were last online. Even so, approximately 24% of people worldwide experience loneliness. We’ve got all the gear and no idea how to actually show up for a friend, knowing less and less about how our loved ones are feeling and assuming closeness through passive contact.

It is almost as though a geotag is replacing time spent in real life.

Communication scientist Jeffrey Hall studied the quantity and quality of time people spend together to climb the ranks of friendship back in 2018 (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4)). The study found that close friendships develop after spending 219 hours together over three months, emphasising the importance of meaningful time together.

This was nearly 10 years ago, pre-pandemic, when face-to-face interaction trumped anything over the phone and we weren’t so chronically online. It noted that increasing episodes of small talk or spending less time in each other’s company could lead to a friendship being downgraded.

Yet we are all guilty of treating a like or reply as a meaningful interaction with our best friends, even when we haven’t seen them in three weeks! Don’t even get me started on people engaging with celebrities’ content more than their own friends’ posts!

What’s more unnerving is that if I turned off my location on Find My Friends, it would set off alarm bells among my already prying friends: “Where were you?” “Why did you turn your location off?”

The irony is that I turned my location off for privacy, but it just invited a barrage of unwanted questions!

This isn’t Pokémon; I’m not a hidden encounter for you to find.

Snowden warned us of this kind of surveillance. Did we all forget that we covered our laptop cameras to stop the CIA from monitoring us? Now we willingly let our friends hone their private investigator skills.

My lack of location is now a form of rebellion because when did a strong digital footprint start to signal a level of trustworthiness?

I am a big believer in inconvenience being the cost of community, but if this borderline stalking behaviour means that you then ask me why I didn’t respond to a text or a phone call, or said no to a catch-up (although I would rarely do this)… that’s even more alarming.

There is a sense of entitlement. The expectation that I’m available simply because my location shows I am home.

Crazy to think that years ago, you could traverse the sea for three months and your loved ones just had to hope for the best until word of your safe arrival reached them.

The constant need for access to people does worryingly correlate with society’s collective desire for instant gratification. We no longer give people the time and space to reveal parts of their lives to us at their own pace.

We are so hungry for closeness that we forget to savour it and miss the depth of what friendship really means.

Sure, there are situations in which location sharing makes sense: you’re worried about your safety and want someone to have specific details of your whereabouts; maybe you live in a different country and want to see what your loved ones are up to; or a parent wants to be able to track their child. But even then, I wonder how this fosters trust.

Which is interesting: if we can look at that dynamic and see it as a foolhardy attempt to keep someone close because we know it breeds secrecy, then why is it OK for friends to monitor each other in the same way?

If this level of surveillance is a symbol of a deep bond, love and emotional safety, why does it feel like I’m a key suspect in a crime I didn’t commit? As clichéd as this sentiment may be, get off the grid and connect with your friends; it’s the cure for loneliness.