When Abby Katzap was studying abroad in Florence and traveling through Europe with her friends, sharing their iPhone locations on the Find My app just made sense. Then 19, her girlfriends initiated the idea, with one arguing that location sharing would keep her safe when walking home alone at night in Dublin.
However, the New York City native was hesitant about the Find My app tracking her. “I thought it was weird. It was creepy,” the soon-to-be law school student recalls to The Independent. “But then I told my friends, ‘OK, fine, if you guys are so worried, here, just take my location.’”
Three years later, Katzap’s list of friends on Find My has grown, with 30 people having access to her every move. And that has led to an internal conflict over if, and when, it’s time to stop sharing.
Available for iPhone owners, the Find My app allows users to easily locate family and friends on a digital map. Once locations are shared between friends, notifications can also be sent when that person is at the gym, leaves for school, or arrives home safe and sound. The app is also used track all Apple products, including laptops, iPads, Airpods, and Airtags.
Typically, young people like Katzap, now 21, rely on the app to track others’ locations. A recent study by Civic Science found that 65 percent of Gen Z adults are most likely to use location sharing, with 16 percent of these adults sharing their locations with at least five people. Instagram is also keeping up with the trends, having just launched a map feature where followers can find each other in real time.
Location sharing is now a booming business in the digital world, where we constantly want to be in the know. “There appears to be an expectation that being close to someone authorizes a heightened level of access to their lives at all times, with Find My being a mainstay of accessing each other,” Kim Rippy, LPC, Licensed Professional Counselor & Practice Owner at Keystone Therapy Group, explains to The Independent. “It appears Gen Zs aren’t seeing it as a breach of privacy, but as a necessity of trust and a reflection of how they value the relationship.”
As a 27-year-old Gen Z woman in Brooklyn, New York, I have been an avid user of Find My for five years, with 17 people on my location sharing list — some of whom include my parents, sister, boyfriend, and friends since childhood.
Although it’s not a social media app, I open Find My a few times per day to see what my friends are up to. It’s a shameless act, as we’re open with one another about doing so, but there are consequences in having access to our friends like this. Checking the app and seeing two of my friends catching up without me has left me feeling anxious, something I didn’t anticipate when I mindlessly opened the app as part of my daily ritual. The roles have been reversed, too.
Despite my hurt feelings, I keep my findings from the app to myself. I also recognize that Find My is not to blame for the unnecessary hurt I feel, which could go away if I just deleted the app — though I don’t intend to do so.
“We tend to assume the best intentions in ourselves and the worst in others,” Rippy says. “But if we were to give other people the same benefit of the doubt that we give ourselves, then the Find My app wouldn’t be nearly as anxiety-inducing. The problem isn’t the app, the problem is how users are interpreting what they’re seeing.”
Still, 26-year-old Anna-Grace Bolen confesses that she’s relied too heavily on Find My app. The Manhattan-based executive assistant explains that in college, she had two friends who would actively check her location, and she’d get texts such as, “I see you’re at Trader Joe’s, can you get me something?” This led to Bolen turning her location off when she was at certain places.
“It wasn’t one-sided, either. If one of them said things were over with a situationship, and I saw her location at his apartment, I’d definitely send a check-in text. It wasn’t really my place to say anything, but at the time I did,” she says. “Even though my intentions were mostly rooted in care and safety, I eventually started to feel exposed—like I was constantly being watched.”
Since then, and after nine years of using Find My, Bolen narrowed down her location list to just 11 people. “I went through and removed people from the app who I didn’t feel connected to,” she said. “I’m a pretty open person—my close friends usually know what I’m up to.”
Meanwhile, Katzap has never had a conflict with friends because of Find My, but she acknowledges that she’s not close to the 30 people who have her location. It’s too awkward to remove them, she says, since that feels like a friendship-ending move.
“ When’s a time for me to just end some relationships?” she says. “Sometimes you can’t delete numbers from your phone because it reminds you of a certain period in your life. Deleting locations is similar. My friends that I don’t talk to, like the girl who wanted to walk home alone in Dublin, never got deleted. Since we had all these lovely times in Dublin.”
Similar to Katzap, I started gradually sharing locations with people during nights out, and just didn’t turn them off. I felt like our relationships were special because they wanted me to keep their locations.
That was four years ago, however, and now I know that some of these locations aren’t a necessity, since they aren’t strengthening my friendships at all. Yet, I still fear I’ll offend friends if they’re deleted from the app, which is a perspective that Rippy urges us to steer away from.
“Especially with Gen Zs, your friends’ locations have always been there, so removing them feels terrible. It feels like I did something wrong. You don’t need to be the best friend to be added,” she explained. “I think that if young people shifted it to best friends, emergency resources, and family members being the only ones on it, it won’t create as much backlash if somebody is removed.”