I was at a bar the other night when a friend and I were wondering what to do next. “Shall we see where everyone’s at?” she said, pulling her phone out. I fully expected her to drop a few lines on WhatsApp. Instead she opened “Find My Friends”, the tracking service app that’s automatically built into iPhones. A friend of ours was about 15 minutes away, she said, flashing me the screen. I could see a little circle with the first letter of his name. “Let’s see if he wants to hang.”
This isn’t unusual. In the three years since I ditched my iPhone for an Android before returning to an iPhone again, everyone’s started sharing their location. Another friend of mine follows around five people, each in various UK locales. “There’s something really comforting about it,” she explained. “Look,” she said, sending me a screenshot. “I like seeing where my friends are, like ‘aww everyone’s at home, everyone’s at work’.” My Gen Z colleague Riann said that her friends do it “all the time” for “entertainment”. “They’ll be like ‘Oh, so is that why you were in West London?’ And I’ll be like, ‘How did you know I was in West London?’”
A part of me feels surprised. Location sharing used to be considered an invasive thing – the sort of tactic used by controlling partners or maybe a safety measure for parents. Not anymore. While researching for this piece, a lot of people told me that it helps them feel safer and more assured that their friends have gotten home okay – it’s a way of bypassing the whole “text me when you get home” thing. Others told me that it just makes their social life easier, from coordinating group hangs to making sure people know that they’re at home and available. Another told me that it helps her feel closer to her friends. “I feel like it’s a badge of honour,” she explained. “Like the next level of friendship.” At least three people told me they used it to facilitate hook-ups.
One of the most interesting things I discovered was that loads of people are using it to get around having to text when they’re running late. “I don’t need to update them,” one person told me, “because they can just see for themselves.” This is something I keep hearing. “We’re all always late and don’t trust each other,” one friend explained. Gone are the days when you could lie that you were on your way when you were actually still doing your hair. FMF is like a big watchful eye hanging above you, except the eye is all of your friends telling you to hurry up already.
