I have been eagerly sharing my location with as many people as possible for years. I have not been very discerning about it - and in fact if anyone in this thread wants my location feel free to message me on signal (drex.64) and I'll share on google maps. No need to share back (though I don't mind)!
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.
> There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing
Indeed, such as "don't, tf is wrong with you?" People don't need to know where I am at all times. I don't need to know where anyone is at all times. Stop normalizing this insane practice.
That's certainly one of the options! However I generally disagree with your point of view. You are welcome to hold to it, but many people already know where you are at all times and I suspect if you ask your community they will have little reflection on what level of sharing feels appropriate. I personally do not want to put the genie all the way back into the bottle.
I've never once allowed a company like Home Depot to know my location with Location Sharing. If their site needs to know what store is "my store", then I use zip code searching and manually setting the store.
There is no way to prevent cell providers from knowing the location of the device connected to their network. We can regulate the industry from selling that location. I don't necessarily mind allowing law enforcement to learn the location of a device with a proper warrant. Them selling the data to any interested 3rd party should be banned punishable by imprisonment of the the entire C-suite.
Sharing your location with family/friends is not even in the same ballpark as sharing with corporate entities. To conflate the two in your mind just shows how fucked we've allowed ourselves to become. Sharing your location with family/friends through social platforms is also not the same thing as sharing directly through the devices. Again, thinking it is just shows how numb we've become to theSocials
The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The cell phone companies (approximately but they can triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.
[1] This one is a little uncertain because it relies on tracking bluetooth / wifi radios and you have to do a pretty complex setup. Simply establishing presence is harder (and ofc the whole thing can be blocked by secure operating systems).
Well, I happen to use a phone without Google's or Apple's services in my personal life. And if I were to go out for something the authorities would not agree with, I most certainly would not carry any phone, smartwatch or whatever while doing so. Maybe an iPod Classic or something to listen to some tunes while I get myself a bloody nose at the Fight Club, collect rich people's body fat from beauty clinics to blow up capitalism or whatever else I might get up to on a quiet evening out.
Seriously though, if I understand you correctly, you want people to be critical of stuff like location sharing and whatnot but your way there somehow involves to normalize said whatnot completely. I don't really follow.
> When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days.
I feel like this kind of information can be found out by just naturally talking with others. Viewing your friend's and family's location all the time is just so unnecessary and overkill. If something is wrong, you simply reach out to others, they don't need to be actively checking your location to determine that. Yeah obviously the exception is crazy emergencies, but I think most people would take their chances than be this open to location sharing. Kids too make sense. Other than that, I don't believe location sharing to this degree should be normalized at all.
Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
> I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in.
There is a huge difference between giving Home Depot permissions to know your location while you are in a Home Depot vs giving Home Depot permissions to know your location 100% of the time.
If I was using a Home Depot app and I wanted the app to know my location, I would share location data using the "Allow While Using App" option instead of the "Always" option. I can't imagine a scenario in which I would want Home Depot to a continuous stream of my location data.
To speak bluntly, I'm not sure you're considering that many people want to hide or to be able to hide activities like adultery, gambling, prostitution, unhealthy food, spending too much time in bars, leaving their wife and kids at home to just go park and sit in a parking lot to get away, etc.
When you're mentally or morally or -whatever term you want- strong, you might miss that some people have things they want to hide that might not be burglary or trespass or murder, but nonetheless they don't want to be broadcast to their social circle.
Maybe we need a term for the Overton window applied to morality (in social terms). If your lifestyle doesn't fit neatly into the thickest part of that window, you might object to always on location sharing but be unable to honestly and openly admit why, leading to people like yourself being puzzled why others might be resistant.
I know! I am not sure you are considering that at the moment full sharing is the default and, in many cases, not optional. It seems like you're under the impression that I want us to share location all of the time when I've just said that's too much. It's just the option we have at the moment. We need to figure out when and how to share location and how to develop expectations around when people can know things.
> and how to develop expectations around when people can know things
is that most people will become paranoid when their romantic partner goes "off grid" at 7pm on a Friday, or their spouse on a work trip turns off location on Saturday, or their child goes off grid after school one day.
if humans could trust other humans "going dark" then that would be great, but it seems so far the only way to be able to be offline that is socially acceptable is to be 100% offline/unmapped all the time socially.
If you're correct then there's no hope. People will realize they can have the data and will take refusal to provide it as a proxy for misbehavior. For some that time is already here. If we can build alternatives that provide important location information in the proper circumstances without fully tracking people we can advocate for a less dystopian use of the technology.
Under what state are you living, where you can expect it to never turn on you? Where corporations aren't exploitative and manipulative?
It can't be the US or EU, that's for sure.
I commonly leave the phone behind and switch to cheap walkie-talkies to lessen the tracking data I produce without giving up the ability to communicate with people nearby but not adjacent.
The simple reason for this is that we are all already sharing our locations with many corporations all of the time. I just shared my location with home depot a few days ago so it could locate which store I am in. Google knows my location constantly. There is an urgent, obvious need for us to develop social practices around location sharing. We must build these practices and preferences within our communities so that as the wide scale tracking develops we can understand what we would consider reasonable. The demarcation of pen registers to track phone calls came out of a sense of what is a reasonable invasion of privacy - we must socially develop that sense around this form of sensing.
I now have a pretty healthy community of location sharing and the stories in this piece are familiar. When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days. There is no question, in my mind, that "always on" sharing is probably too much for most people. But the only way we will develop a detailed sense of what we want instead (and what we should insist on when it comes to corporate tracking) is to engage with it and reflect.
So far my thoughts on how to do it better involve a series of contextual elements to increase or decrease the specificity of sharing. I.e. if you are out doing errands there's no need for a precise location - show a few blocks. However, if you are close to a friend, show a precise location and notify both parties. Consider creating tiers of sharing where when you enter an area of concern (hospital, morgue, etc) your location is visible and flagged for people close to you but otherwise appears generally to others (as if you are shopping as above). Etc, etc. There is much work to do here and I hope others are thinking about how to do it.