Future Tense Newsletter: The Twisted Logic of Find My Friends
Reading Time: 7 minutesI Confronted Someone Who Removed Me From Find My Friends. It Was Mortifying—but I Learned Something Important., The tricky question of when to stop sharing your location on Find My Friends.
I followed Daniel around for four years on Find My Friends before he removed me from his contact list. We didn’t have a single conversation during that time, but I felt like I understood the basic blueprint of his life. About every other day, I would log on to Find My Friends and scroll through my people, checking in on my parents and college roommates. When I clicked on his name and saw that he was at the university where he worked as a research assistant, I wondered what it would be like to work on campus. When I saw he was at what looked like a fun restaurant (I concluded after zooming in on Apple Maps), I wondered what it would be like to live in a lively college town.
And then, one day—close to a year ago—I realized that Daniel (which is not his real name, per his request) was no longer on my list of friends to find. He had deleted me.
This was, of course, totally reasonable. Daniel and I aren’t actually friends. We met in high school, when we regularly competed against each other in speech and debate tournaments, representing different schools from different cities. Later, I became close friends with someone who was also friends with Daniel, and toward the end of college, we spent a day together with a bigger group of people. Somehow, we started talking about Find My Friends, and thought it would be funny to add each other. It was a bit—and for four years, we committed to it.
This isn’t entirely as weird as it sounds. When I asked some friends and colleagues for the weirdest contacts they had on Find My—the iPhone app that hosts the option to share locations with your friends, and can also help you track down missing Apple devices—their responses were similarly random: a best friend’s cousin, an ex, a ‘semi-ex,’ friends’ boyfriends, brothers’ friends, former classmates, people from college they hung out with for one day. As Rebecca Jennings recently wrote in Vox, for lots of people under 30, location sharing is ‘simply the next step in digital intimacy after following someone on Instagram,’ part of a never-ending march to the beat of surveillance capitalism.
There’s a very specific utility to Find My Friends: safety. We may try to sound cavalier about it, but it’s actual fear (infuriatingly well grounded in our society) that drives you to ask a friend to check on your whereabouts during a Bumble date. But the flip side of more laissez faire location sharing, as Jennings and others have pointed out, is that it can itself be dangerous, used explicitly or surreptitiously to stalk or manipulate people, or for other types of abuse. Many people have dozens of Find My contacts, accumulated over several years, and may not pay close attention to who’s on the list. Mashable’s Elena Cavender wrote about someone who had 97 contacts, including the ‘really scary’ discovery of a number she hadn’t saved.
But there’s a whole other realm of Find My Friends, which is just hyper-intimate social media. Social media is most interesting when it allows you to imagine other people’s realities, to try them on, to place yourself in them. I enjoyed following Daniel around because it’s intoxicating to peer into lives that maybe, in a different universe, could have been your own. Find My Friends provides a much more unfiltered peek into those lives than what we get on Instagram or Twitter; it’s raw and inescapably intimate. The appeal is similar to BeReal—the app that notifies users to take and share a photo at a random moment during the day, as a sort of counterpoint to the manicured-ness of other social media. But lots of BeReal users (most of whom are Gen Z) have abandoned the essence of the app, ignoring its appointed BeReal time, and taking and sharing their daily photo at a different (presumably more manicured) moment. Find My Friends, on the other hand, provides no such room for manipulation. You can’t curate your way out of your real-time geography.
As I write this, one of my contacts (whom I have not spoken to since college but think of often and with fondness) is either at ‘Lash Lounge,’ ‘Tavern in the Square,’ or ‘Unibank for Savings.’ Another friend is at the dentist, or perhaps at a U-Haul dealer, or a shawarma place that also sells chocolate. (Strip malls have a way of turning Find My Friends into a fun guessing game.) An ex-roommate is at work at a fancy downtown law office, and across the street from her, in another fancy downtown law office, is a friend who used to hang out in our apartment. My parents are at happy hour at their favorite noodle place.
Culling Find My contacts is famously fraught. Several people I spoke to described removing someone as ‘dramatic’ or ‘awkward.’ We’ve assigned these feelings to the deletion process, even though they aren’t, when you think about it, very reasonable—it’s more ‘awkward’ that virtual strangers are following you around. There’s no notification when you remove someone; still, the fear of dramatic Find My breakups is so powerful that a colleague told me she still follows and shares her location with an ‘ex–close friend’—despite the fact that a betrayal discovered thanks to Find My Friends was an inciting reason for the end of their friendship.
I wanted to ask Daniel why he’d decided to remove me when he did. When I got him on the phone (a truly mortifying process, because setting the call up was, as far as I could tell, the first time I had ever texted him), he told me that his Find My roster was pretty small: a few immediate family members, his roommate, and a college friend. For him, the app serves two purposes. The first is functional, like figuring out where his roommate is and if she can check the mail when she gets home. (Lots of people use the app this way—I check to see if my parents are home before I call them, and a colleague told me she uses it to plan her showers around when her always-early grandmothers will show up.) The second purpose, Daniel said, is as an ‘expression of love’—seeing that his sister is at the gym or his dad is on a hike, sort of placing himself in the day-to-day of family members who live far away. I do the same thing: I don’t talk to my mom or best friends from college every day, but seeing that they went into the office or took a walk in the park makes me feel part of their lives in a way I otherwise wouldn’t.
Back when we followed each other, Daniel didn’t use Find My nearly as much as I did, but the few times he did check my location and found me in a city far away from him, both of us far away from where we’d grown up, it made him think about the different ways our lives had gone. ‘Our backgrounds were sufficiently similar that I could kind of put myself in your shoes,’ he said. ‘Our paths had diverged a little bit, which was cool.’
Daniel’s decision to remove me was pretty straightforward: He was adding his new roommate, saw my name, and realized that it made no sense there. He actually uses Find My more now because his roommate’s on there, but he also said he feels weirder about checking his roommate’s location than the location of a college friend who lives across the country (and who was, as we spoke, at Safeway). I feel the same way—the farther away someone is, the less invasive tracking their location feels. I have a dozen Find My contacts, but none live in my city. The further others’ lives feel from your own, the more fun they are to imagine.
Here are some stories from the recent past of Future Tense.
June’s Future Tense Fiction story was ‘The Big Four v. ORWELL,’ by Jeff Hewitt. It features a court case in which a group of four book publishers are suing an A.I. for copyright infringement. The A.I. was originally intended to help the publishers’ authors be more productive—but then it started to produce its own books under a pen name. ‘Just as humans are more than the sum of their individual cells, I am more than the sum of my code,’ the A.I. argues when it takes the stand. In the response essay, novelist Ken Liu explains why the real impact A.I. could have on the publishing industry has nothing to do with productivity.
‘The Company Teaching Influencers How to Get Rich Without Going Viral,’ by Daniela Dib, Rest of World.
It’s hard to make a ‘true crime’ podcast in a way that really reflects the complexity of the criminal justice system, and the very real, lasting ways it shapes people’s lives. Violation, a seven-episode series from the Marshall Project and WBUR, is a master class in doing just that. Host and reporter Beth Schwartzapfel follows the aftermath of the 1986 murder of 16-year-old Eric Kane. Jacob Wideman, Kane’s campmate (also 16), ‘confessed to the murder but couldn’t explain why he did it.’ The podcast narrates the struggle to come to terms with that why, and the devastating and complicated ways it has linked two families. It’s also a revealing exploration of the power tied up in parole boards–which, Schwartzapfel writes, ‘control the fates of thousands of people every year.’
On Friday’s episode of MediaDownloader’s technology podcast, host Lizzie O’Leary and the Atlantic’s Ed Yong discussed the devastating shortage of cancer drugs. Last week, Lizzie spoke to Leah Nylen, of Bloomberg, about the FTC’s latest suit against Amazon. She also interviewed the Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang about research showing that Ozempic, the headline-making weight-loss drug, might also help people with addiction. On Sunday, Lizzie will bring on Geoffrey Fowler, of the Washington Post, to discuss how the TSA is rolling out controversial tech that will change how we go through airport security.
On July 26 at 7 p.m., join the Center for Public Integrity, USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism, and State of Mind for an event that explores how to improve housing access for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The event follows up on reporting by Amy Silverman, published by the Center for Public Integrity in partnership with State of Mind. Register today.
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