Location sharing is part of social life with Gen Z — but it can take a mental toll
Chantle Jovellanos knows were all 22 of her closes friends and family members are at any given time, with the help of Apple's Find My function.
The 18-year-old from Toronto checks it when she's on her way to meet up with someone to see if they're running late, or occasionally just to see what friends are up to, though never, she says, in a nosy way.
"It's the same kind of vibe as when you text a friend to check up on them," she said. "It's kind of just like being like, 'Oh, I wanna see what's going on in their life right now.' "
For younger social media users like Jovellanos, location sharing has become a way to stay connected and signify who your inner circle is. A recent survey by CivicScience found that Gen Z adults were the age group most likely to share their locations with others.
Last week, Instagram unveiled its new Maps feature, joining a growing list of platforms like Find My, the Life360 app, and Snapchat's Snap Map, which allow users to know each other's whereabouts in real time. Social media experts and psychologists say sharing this information, even with friends and family, comes with consequences, and they urge social media users to think carefully before clicking "share my location."
But according to Jovellanos, sharing your location with someone says, in essence, that you trust them. So when you stop sharing, or refuse to do it in the first place, that can send the opposite message.
"It's kind of like the equivalent of unfollowing someone on social media," Jovellanos said, recalling a situation where a former friend stopped sharing their location with multiple people at once, triggering an uncomfortable conversation that led to the end of the friendship.
Meta, Instagram's parent company, stresses that its new Maps feature is turned off by default. Users who opt in can also select who they want to see their location, turn off location sharing for certain geographical locations and turn the feature off entirely at any time.
In a blog post, the company pitched the map feature as a "new, lightweight way to connect with each other."
But so far the feature doesn't seem to have taken off, and a few claimed they saw their location shared automatically.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in a post on Meta's Threads that those users likely weren't broadcasting their locations in real time.
"We're double checking everything, but so far it looks mostly like people are confused and assume that, because they can see themselves on the map when they open, other people can see them, too," Mosseri wrote.
Adding a location to an Instagram post or story — for example, tagging the Rogers Centre when posting a photo from a Jays game — will make the post appear on the map even though you're no longer at the event.
FOMO and managing perceptionsExperts say that letting people see your location in real time comes at a cost.
A 2023 report on U.S. teen girls' social media use asked respondents about the impact different social media features had on them. Forty-five per cent of respondents said location sharing had a negative impact, making it the function with the biggest reported negative impact.
There were also concerns about safety — including the fear of stalking, which has been well documented. The fear of missing out (or FOMO) was another.
That's a feeling Rachel McHugh knows well from when her best friend was vacationing in Europe. She used Apple's Find My function to see where her friend was dining or what landmarks she was visiting.
In part, it brought her joy to know her friend was having an amazing time. "[I could] pop it open and be like, 'Oh, she's at a castle now. She gets to explore this. I can't wait to ask her about it,' " McHugh said.
But it also made her acutely aware of what she was missing out on while stuck at her desk job.
Emma Duerden, Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience and Learning Disorders and a professor at Western University in London, Ont., says FOMO does have a real impact, with research suggesting that those who felt FOMO also experienced changes in the region of the brain associated with social networking and how we process feelings.
And unlike other kinds of social sharing where users can choose what image or words to use, location data doesn't allow you the "ability to curate how you're presenting yourself," said Xinru Page, an associate professor at Colorado's Brigham Young University, who has studied location sharing.
She says worrying about what people might think if you suddenly stop sharing your location can also have a big impact, which makes disconnecting easier said than done.
Off by default the right move: expertLocation sharing is nothing new — FourSquare, Google Latitude and Life360 have all been around since the late 2000s, while Snapchat and Apple's Find My came about in the mid 2010s. But Page says its introduction on Instagram — one of the most popular social media sites — makes the function more widely available.
She says Instagram made the right choice in turning location sharing off by default, and appreciates the controls that allow parents to make sure it stays turned off for their kids. But she still worries about whether teens will use it safely and responsibly.
Pamela Wisniewski, who studies social computing and privacy as the director of the U.S.-based Sociotechnical Interaction Research Lab says the best practice is to weigh the benefits and risks carefully before sharing your location data, and to only do it on a case-by-case basis, rather than having it on all the time.
"Realize that some of the risks are unknown at the time that you make the post," Wisniewski said. "And then once it's out there, sometimes you can't take that back."
McHugh says she doesn't mind the idea of Instagram's Map function, but for now, she says she'll keep it off since she's already sharing her location with close friends and family on Apple's Find My, which she trusts more.
But it's "something I might investigate to turn on … in the future."
cbc.ca
