Find Our Friends

At any given time, 110 people can tell you exactly where James Tatter is. Every single iPhone user has the Find My app on their phone, which allows them to share their location with friends and family. Increasingly, for young people like James, it's becoming also a form of social media. Endless Thread producer (and James's sister) Grace Tatter wanted to know how something that seems creepy to some people became so commonplace to others — and how it's affecting our relationships off the screen. Show notes: On the Grid: Surveillance as a Love Language (The Drift https://www.thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/) Dodgeball Shuttered By Google, Its Co-Creator Promises To Clone It (Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/shuttered-google-service-dodgeballs-co-creator-promises-to-make-a-new-one-before-sxsw-goog) Thinking Critically about Social Media (American Sociology Association https://www.asanet.org/footnotes-article/thinking-critically-about-social-media/) Talking Tech with Apple's Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue (SuperSaf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka9k_a9fROw) The Impact of Location-Tracking Apps on Relationships (Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/positively-media/201908/the-impact-of-location-tracking-apps-on-relationships) Credits: This episode was written, reported and produced by Grace Tatter. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Amory Sivertson, and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  WBUR Podcast, Boston.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  At any given time, lots of people can pinpoint James Tatter's exact location.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  35, 36, 37.

• 1:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  How many people? Not even he knew until we asked him to count them up.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Wow, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 people where we can both see each other's location. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, Jesus, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41. So 44 people who have my location, but I don't have theirs.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  110 people have James's location on Apple's Find My app, more commonly referred to by its old name, Find My Friends.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  They must have lifted the max because for a while I could no longer, like if I wanted to share my location with someone, I would get a notification being like, you reached the maximum. You need to un-share your location with someone else before sharing your location with this person.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery is one of the sheeple out there, the Apple sheeple. Can you provide a visual description of Find My for my fellow discerning Android users? Emery?

• 2:16Amory Sivertson?

  Well, I am not actually a user of this particular feature, as we will get to. But Find My comes pre-installed on iPhones. And when you open the app, you either see a map of your other Apple devices or a map of people who share their location with you. And you can zoom in to get a pretty exact location. Like, James's friends can see James is in Austin, Texas. James is in his apartment building. James is in a specific part of his apartment building.

• 2:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll come back to that. James is 27 years old, and he's been a marked man for almost a decade.

• 2:56Amory Sivertson?

  When did you start following people on Find My Friends? When did this become a part of your life?

• 3:01Speaker 04

  Sometime in college. Like, all of my housemates, we would all track each other. Just honestly, it started, I think, because we would lose our phones all the time. Very quickly went from like, maybe seven or eight of us sharing our location to, you know, 40 or 50. We did have a random drinking game where you had to, like, if you lost, you had to scroll through your contacts and just share your location with whoever you landed on. And so that probably boosted the list by like 15. And some of those people are still to this day. They just know where I am at all times. They don't know why.

• 3:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  What kind of college did you go to?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Huge public school. So, University of North Carolina, spread out over a few miles. A lot of my friends lived on South Campus, which was a 45-minute walk to North Campus. So, you would need to know, like, have they left their dorm yet? Or like, you know, whose house are they at tonight? And texting people to see, like, are they in my neck of the woods? So I think from a social perspective, it was always nice to see where all your your little Sims are on a map.

• 4:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sims, you know, the popular computer game that debuted when James was just a toddler, where the only object is really just to direct the group of virtual people you create. Your little Sims as they go about their days.

• 4:17Amory Sivertson?

  Today, James still uses Find My to see who's around to hang out, just on a global scale. He works for an educational travel company, organizing international student tours. So he spends a lot of time on the road.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  It is really nice to know if I have a close friend or a coworker that's nearby. Like, I've gotten lunch with a friend in Barcelona because we opened up Find My Friends and realized we were both there.

• 4:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know me, I love an impromptu hangout, but this conversation with James made me feel like... I'm not trying to be an old man. I feel like I keep saying, like, the old man, uh, technology bad comments. Somebody should make a horror movie with a Find My Friends scene. That would be really good.

• 4:58Amory Sivertson?

  Honestly, same. It has never occurred to me to share my location indefinitely with anyone, not even my husband.

• 5:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  It just seems like having all of your friends know what you're doing and who you're with could get awkward. I understand the upside, but I also feel like, for me, I immediately think of this, like, other side of the coin, which is like, people saying like, "I'm on my way." And you're like, "No, you're not, dude. You're still at the dorm." Or people being like, "Oh yeah, sorry, like, can't hang out. I'm on South Campus." And you're like, "No, you're not. You're on North Campus." Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like there's like another side of it.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  100%. If you like lying, sharing your location with hundreds of people is a terrible idea.

• 5:46Amory Sivertson?

  In addition to being a prodigious Find My Friends user, James is also the younger brother of endless thread producer Grace Tatter.

• 5:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you follow her on Find My Friends, if that's the way to describe it?

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. I know for sure that she can track me. I assume I can track her.

• 6:03Amory Sivertson?

  Grace, can he?

• 6:06Speaker 07

  He can, along with 10 close friends, plus a snattering of other relatives. And I also feel weird about it.

• 6:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, why do you feel also weird about it, Grace?

• 6:19Speaker 07

  I mean, for a lot of reasons. I feel weird about giving up my privacy. I feel weird about how it can affect social dynamics. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to look into this.

• 6:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  There are more than a billion iPhone users around the world. They all have Apple's Find My app. And increasingly, people, especially younger people like James, seem to be using Find My in a new way. Today, Grace is going to explain to us why so many people are using it perhaps differently than Apple originally intended, and how that might be affecting our relationships offline. Exhibit A: thousands of TikToks. The first thing I do on Saturday morning is I check my friend's location. I open Find My Friends, and they are like my personal little Sims. She said she wasn't going to see her ex. And where is she at? Her ex's house. And she's gonna lie to me about it. I bet she's gonna lie to me.

• 7:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  We now have the superpower to see where all of our friends are all of the time. But should we?

• 7:21Amory Sivertson?

  From WBUR in Boston, this is Endless Thread. I'm Amory. I forgot I even had Find My on my phone. See you soon.

• 7:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Oldman Johnson.

• 7:33Amory Sivertson?

  And in today's episode, we find our friends.

• 7:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Woohoo!

• 7:48Speaker 07

  OK, Ben and Amory. As you know, I have been thinking about this for a while, and why this idea of tracking each other seems so normal, even to me, even though I also think it's a little weird. I wanted to understand why we started to do this in the first place. So I went to talk to a guy who has literally based his whole career on this technology. Dennis Crowley dreamed of a world where we'd all be carrying little maps with our friends years before it was actually possible. Back in the early 2000s, Dennis was in his 20s, and he was living in Manhattan, building software. You know, I worked at a tech startup making software for Palm Pilots. Do you know what Palm Pilot is? With the little stylus? Yeah, it's like a cellphone that doesn't work.

• 8:33Speaker 07

  These were different times.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  People were just starting to carry mobile phones, and the phones could get, like...

• 8:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Four lines on the screen of just like text-based menus, like no pictures, no colors, no, nothing like that.

• 8:49Speaker 07

  Post-dot-com bust, Dennis and a bunch of his buddies got laid off. And he thought it would be kind of cool to know where everyone was hanging out at any given moment, to look at a map and see all of his friends on it, like in the Harry Potter books.

• 9:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Harry Potter had this magical map, the writer's map of like where everyone was in Hogwarts.

• 9:09Speaker 07

  As many people will remember, in the third Harry Potter book, Harry is given this magical map that allows him to see where everyone at his wizarding school is. So you mean this map shows everyone? Everyone? Everyone. Where they are, what they're doing, every minute of every day. Brilliant.

• 9:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  I remember sitting on a beach reading that book, being like, someone needs to make this thing for New York. And you just know where everyone is all the time.

• 9:30Speaker 07

  In the year 2000, the idea of a map on your cellphone, updating in real time with your friends' locations, might as well have been magic. But it gave Dennis an idea.

• 9:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  The idea was like, if you broadcasted your location, maybe someone would come and meet up with you.

• 9:46Speaker 07

  Basically, he builds a piece of software that sends text blasts to his friends, announcing where in the city he's hanging out, so if they feel so inclined, they can join.

• 9:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I built it for like my 10 friends at the time. And it just, it was kind of nothing for a couple of years. But then when I went to grad school, got connected with my buddy Alex, and we decided to turn it into like a real project.

• 10:10Speaker 07

  This is Dennis's buddy, Alex Rayner. A big motivator was always, can we build software that creates serendipity? Alex and Dennis named the project Dodgeball.

• 10:25Amory Sivertson?

  Which sounds like the opposite of what it really is, right? I hear Dodgeball.

• 10:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dodgeball, you're trying not to get tagged by the ball.

• 10:32Amory Sivertson?

  Dodgeball is the app that I want, where it's like, oh no, there's a person that I know in that coffee shop. Oh my god.

• 10:44Speaker 07

  Online mapping, at least as we know it, wasn't really a thing back then. You could use MapQuest for directions, but there weren't digital maps that showed you local businesses. Alex and Dennis had to manually build and update this huge database of places in New York. So to use the software, you'd send a text with your location.

• 11:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm at, you know, the NYU library.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  With the at symbol, which Dennis assured me at the time was a cutting-edge use.

• 11:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm at The Magician, which is a bar in the Lower East Side. I'm at Ace Bar.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  So if we got a message from you, we would know, okay, this is a phone number we recognize because they have an account. This is a venue we recognize because it's in our database. Let's find this person's friends associated with the account. Send them a text message that says, Grace is at The Magician. You should stop by and say hi. Here's the address.

• 11:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  It sounds kind of dumb now. Like, yeah, I get a message of where you are. But like, when people got these messages, you kind of dropped whatever you were doing. And you were like, oh, someone's over here. Let's just go over there.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  Sometimes there was an exponential effect. Like Dennis would say that he was at The Magician. Five of his friends would come, check in and say they were at The Magician.

• 12:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  You'd have these certain nights where just 20, 30, 40 people would show up at the same place because everyone had this superpower of knowing where everyone else was.

• 12:14Amory Sivertson?

  I can get down with this, I think, because if you're checking into a place, you're inviting other people to join you. It's not like, oh, I was just trying to have a drink by myself on a Wednesday. You know, it's like, which I've never ever done in my life.

• 12:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory loves to drink by herself on a Wednesday.

• 12:37Speaker 07

  To Dennis, Alex and their friends, it felt like magic. But not everyone felt that way.

• 12:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  I remember demoing this to people, like investors and reporters at the time. And they're like, this is crazy. Like, you want everyone to know where you are? I'm like, well, why would I not? Like, I'm not hiding. But do you want them all to know?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  To come here, like, no, of course I don't want them to come here. Well, why would you broadcast it? Well, some of them will come here and that's more fun than none of them coming here. And it was just a really hard concept for people to wrap their heads around.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  Even the people who got it encountered some problems. We had a bunch of, almost like, social bugs at the time.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Sometimes, like, someone would send you a friend request. I'm like, you're not gonna, like, deny it, so you're gonna prove it. But you don't really wanna hang out with that person. But that's the person that ends up showing up all the time.

• 13:30Amory Sivertson?

  This is the flip side, right? Like, this is exactly why I would not broadcast to everyone. Or I would probably just, like, send a good old-fashioned text to the people who I wanted to show up. You know? And say, like, hey, I'm at this place. And that way you don't have the, what do you call it, a social bug?

• 13:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's one of those things that, like, it works in, like, a perfect world. Where, like, everybody wants to hang out with each other and everybody's down to clown. But, like, everybody doesn't always wanna hang out with each other, you know what I mean?

• 13:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, and Dennis and Alex tried to take that into account when building Dodgeball.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  We built a way for people to be friends. But then we also enabled a way for you to, like, block them, right? So, like, all right, I have 100 friends. But when I send my message, it's only gonna go out to 99, because I don't want this person to show up. They're all just human problems moved to software.

• 14:19Speaker 07

  Dodgeball was bought by Google in 2005. Then Google shut it down. And it was a few years before they launched their own location-sharing service. Google Latitude. Which you almost certainly don't remember, because it never really became a thing like FindMyDid. And that's because, in the meantime...

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

• 14:44Speaker 07

  In 2007, Steve Jobs introduces us to the iPhone. Back when Dennis and Alex built Dodgeball, everything had to be text message-based. Because most people couldn't download third-party software onto their cellphones. But now, with Apple's App Store, all it takes is a tap.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  It's that simple, to put the app right on the phone.

• 15:10Speaker 07

  In 2009, Dennis starts a company called Foursquare. Foursquare is basically dodgeball for smartphones. Your friends can see when you check into locations like restaurants and bars. By 2009, online location services were much more sophisticated. No one had to manually maintain a database of businesses. But we still didn't quite have the magical map Dennis had pictured, until an Apple intern, who kept losing their phone in couch cushions, relatable, made a suggestion. What?

• 15:44Speaker 07

  Find My Phone. A map that showed the exact location of your device, right down to the room in your apartment where you left it. A few years later, Apple took that feature a step further.

• 15:59Speaker 07

  Now, Find My iPhone is really great, but what if you could find your family and friends? That was Apple's famous executive, Eddie Q. And this was the new app, Find My Friends. So now, when I'm in Disneyland, for example, I can easily see where my family is. I can even see if my son made it to school okay today.

• 16:22Amory Sivertson?

  He does seem to be presenting this as like a very practical, this is how you can keep Yeah. track of where your family is, as opposed to James Tatter, who, as he told us earlier, is following 100-plus people.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, as far as I can tell, Apple doesn't see Find My Friends as a social networking tool. In 2015, Apple rules it into the same app as Find My Phone and pre-installs it on all new iPhones, so it can't be deleted. A couple of years later, Google adds location sharing to Maps and Snapchat launches Snap Map. They introduce it with a commercial showing two women wondering how to spend their evening before consulting their Snap Map with all of their friends' locations. Looks like everyone's at a show. They haven't started yet. Let's go.

• 17:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  These are the people that don't get invited to the show for reasons.

• 17:16Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, no.

• 17:18Speaker 07

  But while Snapchat is clearly a social media app, Find My Friends is not. It doesn't have a newsfeed or a way to engage with the content being displayed. We often think of our tethered to social media being the dopamine from likes and views. But no one likes your location in Find My Friends. And you can't see how many people are checking in on you at any given moment.

• 17:40Amory Sivertson?

  All right, that's creepy. I'm saying it. I don't like it.

• 17:44Speaker 07

  You want to know who's creeping on you?

• 17:46Amory Sivertson?

  I don't want anyone to be able to creep on me in the first place. But yeah, just the idea that people are like watching you move through the world, even just loved ones feels, there's an ick factor for me, I gotta say.

• 17:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know, I just, I'm just don't want to know because like, I feel like I'd be really disappointed. Nobody's creeping on me.

• 18:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really wish people would care about what I'm doing.

• 18:11Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, man.

• 18:14Speaker 07

  Find My Friends is different in another way, too. With Dodgeball, you had to text to share your location, right? Even with Foursquare, you have to actively check into a place. But once you accept someone's request, Find My is always running, which gets us closer to a real-life magical map, but can also come with some real social bugs, as Alex described them.

• 18:40Speaker 07

  More about those, including the time my brother James encountered a social bug so bad, he had to stop sharing his location after a break.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you, too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 20:17Amory Sivertson?

  OK, so we're now living in a world where we could all know exactly where each other is at all times.

• 20:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which to some people, old people like me, sounds like a scary movie and is, for other people, something that they totally, voluntarily opt into.

• 20:37Amory Sivertson?

  Mm-hmm. Like Grace Tatter, who uses Find My Friends with, how many people, Grace?

• 20:43Speaker 07

  I have 16 people on Find My Friends. All but one person is a mutual follow. Isabel, if you're listening, I did notice that you stopped sharing your location with me while I was checking for this episode.

• 20:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, Isabel.

• 20:56Amory Sivertson?

  Isabel on blast.

• 20:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Isabel.

• 21:00Speaker 07

  That's fine, though. That's fine, though. I respect your privacy. But I definitely did not always use Find My Friends. I had an iPhone for years before it occurred to me.

• 21:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK, when did you start using it?

• 21:12Speaker 07

  OK, so this was a few years ago, and I'd just gone through a breakup. So my boyfriend had just moved out of our apartment, and it was the first time in my life that I was living alone. And I just kind of realized that, like, nobody knows when I get home, or if I get home or not. Like, if I go for a run, like, no one knows if I make it back. So I started sharing it with just a few people for safety reasons. But then something kind of funny started happening. Other friends would hear about it that some of us had each other's locations and they would feel left out. So I would start sharing my location with them too. And so now for one of my friend groups, pretty much we're like the bulk of us, or everyone who has an iPhone is sharing their location with each other.

• 21:57Speaker 07

  And we're kind of using it differently than I used to. I wouldn't say that it's purely safety anymore. So like right now, I can see my friend Thompson is working from home today and he lives like a few blocks away from me. So maybe since I know he's not in the office like right after work, I could be like, hey, do you want to go on like a 30 minute walk? Oh, this is interesting. James is in Santa Cruz, Ecuador. I didn't know that. So maybe I'll ask him what's up in Ecuador.

• 22:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is there like a blanket of comfort that rests upon you using this app?

• 22:34Speaker 07

  There is something just satisfying right now. Like I just see all these little dots around my part of Brooklyn. And I'm like, that's, you know, that's my community. That's my people.

• 22:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just like having an ant farm when you're a kid?

• 22:49Speaker 07

  My little ants, exactly.

• 22:55Speaker 07

  Even though I'm clearly using this differently than I originally started to, kind of more like dodgeball in some ways, like a lot of times to make plans. I've been wondering if it's accurate for me to call this a social media app. Like that is how we're using it now, right? So I called up Diraj Marthi. He's a professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Texas at Austin. And his main area of research is social media. Human beings have always been social. That's just part of our cognitive evolution, really. So human beings are going to take any technology on hand to update other human beings. Sure. Find my friends is a more passive update than a letter

• 23:40Speaker 07

  or a postcard or even an Instagram post. But it's still communicating something to people. When people update, they're reinforcing that community. They're strengthening ties. It's saying, here I am, I exist, look at me, but also I want to hear about you. Dieter said, we can still glean a lot from passive updates, or at least assume a lot. All will under the guise that we're not updating at all. And that might be important to some people, especially younger people, because they don't want to seem like they're trying too hard. There seems to be this idea of like being aggressive on social media is a negative. And they seem to say, oh, millennials do that, millennials do that, but we, we don't.

• 24:25Speaker 07

  We tend to be, you know, kind of more mellow and we'll just, you know, quietly update in that way. There's also the sense that Find My Friends is more pure than other social media platforms. At this point, we are all super used to and aware of the idea that we are passively updating companies with our location to sell us ads. But there are no ads on Find My and sharing your location with your friends feels less icky than sharing it with poor profit companies. But Dieter points out that this app does not exist outside of market forces. Let's say all your friends are in Find My and you're an Android user. Well, it's going to probably pull you towards Apple.

• 25:04Speaker 07

  So there is, you know, there is a capitalistic force occurring here that isn't just purely surveillance capitalism. But at the same time, like, we don't know what technology companies are doing with like all those locations. I might think I'm just sharing my location with 16 people, but I'm assuming that they're the only people looking at their phones. Right. But what if their phone gets stolen or seized somehow? Anyone who has access to their phones is also going to be able to see my exact location. And I'm just sharing who these people are, these like 16 of my closest confidants and relatives with Apple. I think that that is a huge level of trust that's placed in technology companies to say,

• 25:47Speaker 07

  here are my 100 closest, like, you know, confidants in the world, here you go. And as I learned, sharing your location with one person can easily lead to sharing your location with another and another. If you start sharing your location with lots of people, you may, you may reduce your bar, right? As to like, like, if you're just sharing with your immediate family, that's what you're. You're saying is the criteria. But if you open it up to a larger thing and that person falls out with you or whatever, and you forget you're sharing location, what does that mean?

• 26:21Speaker 07

  There are no exaggeration, a full episode's worth of reasons some people might be wary of being surveilled, even if they are participating in the surveillance, even if they're surveilling right back. Gender, immigration status, race, age. Deiraj says that all of these factors might affect how comfortable we are with this technology. If people feel particularly vulnerable, they're probably less likely. But maybe they also want to for network and community. Deiraj has a serious shortcut that causes his phone to start recording and sharing his location with a confidant if he gets pulled over by the police. It's not a social media in that way, but it's using these technologies for protection in that case,

• 27:05Speaker 07

  which is exactly the same technologies, just in a very different tooling of them. In my experience, at least, the safety aspect is inextricable from the social aspect. Location sharing has become symbolic. You're a person I'd need if something terrible happened. You're a person I trust. But if it's hard to isolate the safety aspects of Find My Friends from the social, it's also hard to isolate the control aspect. I love my friends, obviously, and I don't think they're trying to control me when they check in to ask what I could possibly be doing in Jersey City on a Sunday afternoon, for example.

• 27:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  What were you doing in Jersey City on a Sunday afternoon?

• 27:48Speaker 07

  That's for me to know, Ben.

• 27:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, come on.

• 27:53Speaker 07

  But as I've added more people to the app, I have, on occasion, become self-conscious about my behavior in a way I might not have in a pre-location-sharing world. And I do think access to this one piece of information might sometimes make us feel entitled to more information.

• 28:12Amory Sivertson?

  Grace, this reminds me of something that your brother James told us, like a very particular thing that happened to him.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  I've only ever had one time where I would say, I was like, oh, this backfired. And I actually am gonna stop sharing my location with you because of how you use this.

• 28:28Amory Sivertson?

  He was hanging out with his girlfriend Perry. They had just started dating.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Someone reached out and was like, hey, are you seeing Perry? And I was like, how do you, like, we hadn't talked about that with anyone. How do you know that? And she was like, I zoomed in on your location and could tell that you're at her apartment.

• 28:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  James and Perry live in the same building. So you'd have to get really close on that map and zoom way in to be able to tell that James was hanging out in her apartment, not his.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  I was like, that's really annoying. And like, I honestly just wish you hadn't asked because we weren't talking about it with other people yet. And so I was like, it, it's one thing to, you, you knew that information. And at the end of the day, like, you do have my location that's on me. But I was like, if I wanted to have that conversation, we would have. And so now you're using my location to like, put me in situations I don't want to be in.

• 29:24Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it's like the technology enables us to be this nosey, but it doesn't mean that we should be, you know?

• 29:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, and once people have crossed the line, or even if your relationship has just changed with someone and you don't really want them to have your location anymore, it can be really awkward to say that. Exhibit B, many more TikToks.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Dying to know who the messy little employee was at Apple that was like, do you know what would be a great function of Find My? Like when two people are sharing their location, let's put a billboard in their text conversation that says, so and so, stop sharing their location with you. Because like, I bet that will cause zero conflict. All I need to be able to do is to turn off my location for an individual person without it sending a text message. I'm just like, at what point do we say, okay?

• 30:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  That was cute. That was fun. That's enough. Yeah, it's really hard to put the genie back in the bottle, right? I think about that at a larger level, too, not just with Find My, but like, you know, Maps uses your location, your ride hailing app or ride sharing app uses your location. There are all these apps now that are like way more useful when you have location data attached to it. Right? It's much more convenient for the user. And we've all been so acclimated to this world in which we're expected to give up this information from jump. It feels weird when we claw it back to ourselves and to others, and it can feel hard.

• 30:53Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, this is like tech applied and amplifying a problem that really is as old as time, which is just that relationships are hard. Friendships are hard. They're very hard to end. And I'm, you know, old lady here again, but I'd say you just gotta talk it out. Gotta talk it out with your friends and say, say, hey, I'm like not sharing my location with as many people anymore. And that's that. Ba-da-bing. Problem solved. Right?

• 31:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that's basically what James did. He was pretty direct with his friend who zoomed in super far on his location.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  You can't be subtle. You can't just like quietly stop sharing your location because it sends a notification in your text chat. So I did. I knew that was going to happen. So I did text them. I had a time to be like, hey, like, don't want you to think that we're not still cool to talk or whatever, but that did make me a little uncomfortable. And just for my own kind of peace of mind, I'm going to stop sharing my location with you. Like, let me know if you want to talk more about that. And they were like, yeah, that was probably a little over the line. I get it.

• 31:59Amory Sivertson?

  We asked James if he has any hard and fast rules for Find My.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny that you call them rules. I mean, one of the, Apple added a new feature within the last year where now if you open a text conversation with someone whose location you have, it, it has their location right there. Like, you don't even need to click out of the text feed. Oh, wow. I don't know if you can see that, but like underneath this contact's name, like in the text feed, it has her, like, Cambridge, Massachusetts. So, that has changed things a little bit, but I do think there's some unspoken etiquette to it. I've never, like, discussed that with anyone of, like, don't check someone's location. I mean, you can do it on accident, or you can do it out of curiosity, but like, if you're doing it for a purpose, yeah, like, you need to text them, otherwise you're just a stalker. Like, don't be a stalker, I think is the one piece of etiquette with this.

• 32:47Amory Sivertson?

  Well, a big plus one to that, but also I'd say, I think where I've landed with all of this is the safety piece resonates with me so much right now that I think I actually am going to start sharing my location with one person.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Me.

• 33:08Amory Sivertson?

  Grace Tatter. Um, I'm gonna share it with my sister, because I so worry about this eroding the communication and the trust, that I'm not willing to do that to my marriage and some of my other close friendships. Like, that, that is a, that is a genie that I do not want to take out of the bottle and then have to try to put back in. I would much rather just have one person, you know, my sister, my best friend for life, know where I am if somebody needs that information. And I think for all, for all my other relationships, I

• 33:48Amory Sivertson?

  just, this is like a good reminder to over-communicate, not in an annoying way, but in a, like, I am intentionally reaching out to you because I'm actively thinking of you and I wanna know what you're up to, or how you're doing. So, yeah, this is, this has been illuminating.

• 34:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm always fascinated by the ways in which humans come up with new uses for technology that we build. Um, and sometimes I'm horrified, but most of the time I'm just fascinated by it. And so, I want to and do effectively

• 34:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Believe that that this could be really fun. And like I said before, like I love spontaneous hang. That's one of my favorite kinds of hang, right? I can imagine Find My as something that increases the serendipity of life in a way that like I could really appreciate and value as somebody who moves through the world and really enjoys spending time with the people that I care about and who care about me. And I think thinking carefully about the way that we interact with each other is made more difficult by technology that is based on convenience.

• 35:06Amory Sivertson?

  Where are you with all this, Grace?

• 35:08Speaker 07

  Well, y'all, I truly intended to end this by going through all of the people in my Find My list and hitting Stop Sharing Location. I thought that would be a really nice little narrative bow on this episode.

• 35:22Amory Sivertson?

  It's not too late. We're sit, we'll wait right here, Grace.

• 35:26Speaker 07

  I know.

• 35:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  We believe, we believe in you.

• 35:28Speaker 07

  But I can't do it. I do kind of like this little visual of my community and where I fit geographically into that.

• 35:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  You love the ant farm after all, Grace.

• 35:38Speaker 07

  I love the ant farm.

• 35:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  You love your Sims.

• 35:40Speaker 07

  I guess I do. And honestly, y'all, what can I say? I just need to know who's around for a walk.

• 35:53Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 35:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was written, produced, reported, and found by Grace Tatter. It was edited by Meg Cramer, co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Emery Stevenson, and your old man, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 36:09Amory Sivertson?

  Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is production manager Paul Vikes, managing producer Sumit Tojoshi, Franny Monahan, and Dean Russell.

• 36:18Speaker 07

  Thank you to the many people I talked to for this, including my brother, James Tatter, Dennis Crowley, Alex Rayner, Deirdre Murphy, the media psychologist Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Center for Surveillance Studies at the University of Oerhuss, Anders Albrechtsland.

• 36:35Amory Sivertson?

  And Zoe Hitzeg, whose essay in The Drift, "On the Grid: How Surveillance Became a Love Language," is linked in the show notes.

• 36:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between sisterly surveillance and the surveillance state.

• 36:48Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh.

• 36:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  You cannot find us on Find My Friends.

• 36:51Amory Sivertson?

  But you can. Email us at [email protected] with all your unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Cherben, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, "I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there." Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and

• 38:27Speaker 04

  my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the quiet tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:48Speaker 02

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• 39:17Speaker 03

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