My mum would call it ‘checking on your SIMS.’ She was not referring to the actual game, instead, to the act I used to do incessantly when a friend was coming to pick me up, watching a small blue dot move minute by minute towards me on Find My. The popular Apple feature allows you to keep track of your Apple belongings, friends and family. You control who you share your location with and vice versa, the aim of course being safety. The feature is incredibly useful for nights out, festivals, or checking to make sure your loved one landed safely on holiday. In a world where we are incredibly aware of the dangers around us and thus safety is paramount, additional features that allow us to know our friends got home safe are of course welcome. However, mine and my friends’ use of ‘Find My’ goes far beyond safety measures, it’s normalised surveillance.
Turning on ‘Find My’ initially wasn’t something I gave much thought to, I happily began to share my location with my closest friends, after all what did I have to hide? The thought that I was under surveillance and was also surveilling my friends didn’t cross my mind. After all, I used to scroll the section of Instagram that would tell you who people had begun to follow religiously, so I guess you could say the boundaries of privacy have always been blurred for me. Slowly though, I began to notice behaviours that I didn’t like. I would send a message to one of my best friends, it would go unanswered for, let’s say, thirty minutes, and then I’d check their location as if that was going to give me the answer as to why they hadn’t replied. A friend would say they were on their way to pick me up, I’d check their location and they hadn’t left their house yet, and suddenly I’d begin to feel annoyed that they’d lied to me – albeit a small white lie. I’d be out for the day and I’d get a message like, ‘When you’re done at the gym, phone me’, knowing full well I hadn’t told anyone I was going to the gym. I began to notice I was keeping tabs and my friends were doing the same to me.
Why Does ‘Find My’ make me uneasy?
Obviously I trust my friends and I had nothing to hide about where I was or what I was doing, but it was the principle that began to make me feel uneasy. A vital step of communication was being missed. The best part, in my opinion, of being best friends with someone is hearing their mundane news and sharing yours. I do want to know that you tried the new coffee shop in town, took on an extra shift last week, or went to Tesco to get a sweet treat last night but I want to know these things from you, not from Find My.
Stop checking!
Some people might say to stop checking Find My then, but it’s not that easy. This level of surveillance has become so normalised that when messaging a friend, under their name it will say their location. WhatsApp and Instagram will tell you when someone is online or how long ago they were on their device. Through Snapchat you can meticulously work out if someone is ignoring your message as you see their snap score increase whilst you’re left on delivered, or even worse, opened. Our houses have Ring door bells, we can rattle off our sleep scores for the last week, and check an app to tell us when our period is coming. It’s safe to say surveillance is being packaged as a new love language.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m at best a skeptic of this cultural shift, and at worst a hater of it. Let’s bring back the mystery! Share updates about even the most mundane things in person and above all, let’s have some privacy. I should be able to scroll for far too long in the night without Instagram alerting you to the fact that I was last active at 4am!
Happily, I turned my location off and I don’t check my friends’ locations anymore. I live comfortably in the knowledge that if something about their routine, their lives, the places they’ve been or the people they’ve seen is worth sharing, they’ll share it with me. Most of our lives are mundane routines. We should be able to live them without feeling that someone is always watching, otherwise it’s just another layer of unnecessary performance. You don’t need to know that I didn’t make it to the library before 1pm or that I was in bed by 8pm on a Friday. If I think you need to know, I’ll tell you!