'Someone's always watching': Gen Z is spying on each other
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Teens and 20-somethings are embracing location sharing to see where their friends are instantly. Is that a bad thing?
It seems like a good idea in theory but there are so many issues with this. First of all, it's a good way to keep track of your friends and make sure they are safe, but at the same time if a stranger gets access to a phone they will know where all their friends are. That'd be a wet dream for stalkers. Secondly, it seems like it would be a good way to make sure your friends aren't doing anything shady, but that also means if they are doing something that they don't want their friends to see they could just leave their phone at home which is very dangerous. And if you just disable the tracking that immediately breaks the trust of the friendship even if it was just over being embarrassed about going to McDonalds three times in one day.
I get it if it's a tight friend group, but as you get older you really start to notice some of your friends are just shitty people. I cut ties with more toxic people in my 20s than I ever thought I would have to. I could only imagine what some of them may have done if they could track my every move. I've had people I consider friends break into my house before I ever even noticed anything toxic about them.
It's amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren't really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.
If cell phones weren't as ubiquitous as they are now I can definitely see it not being an issue in the past. But with literally everything being online and on our phones I could easily see something going badly. Like, I don't think you can even buy maps at gas stations or rest stops in the US these days and those things used to be everywhere. And without being able to use GPS, call someone, and in some peoples cases won't even be able to buy anything since there are so many people that rely on things like Apple Pay, there are so many things that can go wrong with one point of failure. Most people wouldn't even know what day of the month it is or even how much money they have without their phone.
One of the reasons I keep a map in my car, which I've actually had to use a couple times when my phone died on a long drive.
I go out without my phone pretty often just because it's not with me all the time, and I haven't experienced said danger, although I agree that it could be inconvenient in the wrong circumstances.
That's an interesting point you made about disabling the tracking breaking trust with friends. Everyone is entitled to private moments, and it is strange that friends would feel entitled to your location, particularly when the focus should primarily be about the safety of the group. I suppose we have young people who have come of age in an era when they've had little digital privacy. This doesn't just include corporations and governments but also from their guardians. I could see how this may seem normal to them, but it seems unhealthy from where I'm standing.
I think what my point is mostly about is that once one person does it for an arbitrary reason then everyone does it for an arbitrary reason. I guess I'd say that it breaks the trust of the commitment very easily. I've seen it with similar situations all the time. I have a discord server where I play games with all my friends and one day one of the people in the server disabled the ability to see what they were playing. Next thing you know everyone is hiding their activity and nobody knows what anyone is doing. Instead of being a feature that was sometimes disabled it turned into a feature that is sometimes enabled instead. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that it's the way things go.
I remember a time when if I wanted to know what my friends were up to I would call their home without even knowing if they were there to pick up. Location sharing is unnecessary at least 95% of the time and I don't get the appeal.
I know this makes me sound old but I don't care.
If the govt can see everywhere I go, why not Jimmy from White Castle too?
embracing a surveillance state... could never be me
Yeah it's not going end well.
I think there's a big generational gap and people just don't understand how younger gens integrated technology into their lives. Plenty of millennials have "online friends" and their boomer parents would have told them that's extremely dangerous. Some of it undoubtedly was, but online friend groups are a real thing. I think the same is true of location sharing.
I have family who are older who share it and it's helpful to know that they're safe without having to bother them whenever I worry. I also have younger people in my life and they use it for scheduling purposes with each other. "Oh X is still at practice so can't help with this right now I should reach out to Y who is at home". Kids these days are just more interconnected and that is probably more ok than we think it is. There are definitely some problems with it, but it's just new and different. Kids will bully or create drama about whatever, so it may cause some rifts, but if it wasn't that it would've been something else.
Mike Johnson has entered the chat
And you all thought I was the weird one.
Dad, leave me alone, I'm jerking off!
I know, son. Make sure to put it in the log!
used to do that with my partner, sometimes after a hard day at work i sat in my car for 15 minutes, stopped sharing when I realized she was calling me after I say idle for 10 minutes to complain about my laziness.
when stopped sharing, my hydroponic I built with my daughter got watered with bleach.
it wasn't an easy divorce and the abuse is still ongoing
If they choose to share their location then it seems fine to me
Oh man this is gonna twist so many incel knives.
Imagine having a crush on some girl, making a move, feeling like it might've gone ok, and then you see her and that dude you hate are in the same location, at his place, at 330 am.
Incel violence isn't really the epidemic you're making it sound to be. There have even been papers written about the lack of it.
I understand why people, especially families, would want to have this. I creeps me out though. Maybe if I had kids Id think differently though.
This is not normal.
It's not spying if you're giving people access on purpose.
But if you're being peer pressured into it is it on purpose?
If you're not counting peer pressure as on purpose, practically nothing you do until the age of 30 is on purpose.
Exactly. Clickbait titles are ingrained in "news" media writers, though. Or the AI was trained that way and can't change now.