The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing

Summary

The digital world of 2025 is an increasingly dark place—promises of an end-of-history, neoliberal technotopia have foundered on the rocks of monopoly, nativism, and a fractured epistemological understanding of the world. I’ve personally seen the retreat from the “digital public square” to semi-private spaces: group chats, invite-only servers, forums. Some of them are “group chats that rule the world.” Indeed, we seem to be, collectively, past “Peak Social Media.” This week, Julia Kieserman investigates the rise of a different sort of digital private space: social location sharing.—Hal Triedman, Reboot Editorial BoardBy Julia B. KiesermanMy brother is a notoriously awful texter. Texts go unacknowledged for days and then weeks, sheepishly answered only when he has stumbled upon a meme, an article, or a funny anecdote he wants to share. While frustrating, there is an honesty to the implicit demand that we make no expectations on his unreliable and often unreachable virtual self. It holds the faintest echo of a time when a landline’s sharp ring cut through the silence of an empty house or a hastily signed postcard arrived mildly battered three months after the fact. It is a declaration of liberation from a shiny piece of alloy, bits of Earth extracted and reconstituted to weigh down our pockets and wear down our fingers. He is not his phone and his phone is not him.Or at least, it wasn’t him.A few months ago, he started sharing his location with us, the friends and family who love him. With the flick of a wrist, he absolved himself of the stress of answering the question that location sharing is best suited to answer: where are you right now?My brother isn’t alone. A 2022 Harris poll found that four in five U.S. adults use location sharing tools like Apple’s FindMy and Google Maps to share their real-time location data with whomever they choose. While we have long known that we are being watched by the advertising industry, the bread and butter business that keeps our t...