Location Sharing Is Apparently Really Common Among Acquaintances ⇥ vox.com

Rebecca Jennings, Vox:

Friends sharing their real-time locations with each other is a pretty recent facet of modern life. Though apps like Foursquare have been around since the dawn of the smartphone age, mass location sharing was only introduced around 2017, when Google rolled out location sharing on its Maps function and Snapchat launched Snap Map, allowing users to see where their contacts were at any moment. By the time Apple merged the Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps into a single app called “Find My” in 2019, location sharing had become just another type of social networking, despite the fact that for many people, it still feels a little icky.

Shows how out of touch I am that I am only now learning this is an apparently common thing among friends. When Apple launched Find My Friends in 2011, these kinds of use cases were in its marketing pitch — why would someone need to know the location of their friends, even temporarily, “for a couple of hours for a dinner”? — and I do not know anyone who has actually used Find My in this way. None of my friends do; neither does my family.