It's 10pm – and you definitely know where your child is.
Thanks to the surge in location sharing apps, parents, partners and peers can despicably identify the exact location of their loved ones.
Check your device. These apps may already be pre-installed on your smartphone, like Find My Friends on your iPhone. So don't be surprised if your nosy friends are following your whereabouts.
For some, abilities are not creepy, they are accepted. They use free tools to track their friends for convenience and safety purposes, and for fun.
“I justly seek everyone's place and I always share it,” 21-year-old Maria Camila Garcia told the Post. “Having someone's place is a way of knowing you're really going to be friends.”
Location tracking can also lead to many dramas. People complained about the post about the issue You'll be caught in places you personally want to go to and where you want to do the difficult task of cutting the connection between feuds.
“I absolutely use it to avoid roommates and know when I won't go to a certain location,” confessed Garcia, a resident of East Village.
Most Americans (89%) say their lives benefit from sharing locations. This is according to a survey conducted by Life360, the location app that boasts 80 million active users as of last month.
However, there may be intergenerational gaps.
“My millennial parents think that makes sense and will track me down to this day,” Garcia said.
From life-saving text messages to the moment of gamification and friendship end, here are some of the ways location sharing apps have dramatically impacted people's lives.
Peace of the parents' hearts
Jennifer Long, 51, has been following her two children (now 18 and 16) at Life360 since she began returning home from Connecticut middle school.
“Here in Greenwich, most parents have this on their children's mobile phones. It's very common,” she tells the post, which provides her with a “extra level” of comfort and provides some degree of independence for her children.
When her eldest daughter, Audrey, moved to Manhattan for college a few months ago, she decided to maintain a link with her mother, but she didn't let her friends track her down.
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“I'm not a huge fan, and unlike my sister who uses snapmaps with her peers, Audrey doesn't always like to see where she is.
But mom is a different story. Audrey will share Uber notifications and add another layer of safety to carry pepper spray and personal alarms.
“It's very crazy,” Audrey told the Post, comparing NYC to Connecticut. “It's very important to stay vigilant as a woman.”
However, the arrangement is not mutual.
One day, when Jennifer's girl one day she one day “works aesthetic,” the upset mom prevented her children from tracking down her.
“It's really more myself I'm watching Their Jennifer said.
In case of emergency
Travis Christensen, 38, of Shirley, Arkansas, received a worrying warning from Life360 on January 29th about his wife Britney's location.
She and their four-year-old daughter, Delilah “Bug” fell into a “very serious” head-on collision, twice spinning before Subaru settled on that side.
Within minutes he received a text from the app warning that “a sudden movement was detected on Britt's phone,” sending her exact location and suggesting Travis Cole check her out.
He immediately called 911 to contact his wife, then jumped into his car.
Before he completed the 45-minute drive, the first responder was able to rescue his wife and children and call him to make sure they were safe – miraculously there were no major injuries.
“I received that early notification so when I actually met my wife and daughter, I met them when they were still being assessed by their first counterpart,” Travis marveled. “I was able to get there very quickly.”
Travis and Brittney began to pursue each other ten years ago when he was in active military duties. They currently follow four non-phone children, ages 10, 8, 7 and 4, with tile trackers in their backpacks, the father of Travis' RV Traver, ages 73, 73, and four children with “escaping artist” dogs.
“It gives you peace of mind,” Travis said.
I'm looking at friends like Sims
There is no shame in this game for Morgan Maloney.
“I love gathering friends like little Pokemon and Sims,” the 38-year-old from Long Island joked. Create a round on social media.
It began purely as a safety movement, she explained – as if friends were safe to go home from parties or late-night work shifts.
But now it's primarily “just for fun,” millennials acknowledged.
And while some, like Maloney's 26-year-old brother, refused to opt in, not wanting to be tracked down, she still likes to check where her loved ones are.
“Now I have a small collection,” she joked.
FOMO: Track your friends in town
Shounak Vale, 28, of Long Island City, is slightly offended when his friend doesn't allow him to digitally monitor him.
Recently Vale received a text from his best friend who saw him. That's when Vale realizes that his BFF doesn't allow him to follow back.
“How is it fair to know where I am? But I don't know where you are?” asked the Veil, who tracks around 25 friends. After some thrusts, his buddy succumbs to allow Veil to pursue him.
“I think it's very helpful,” he said. “Mainly because New York seems like a city where everyone is doing something all the time.”
Being “messy”
Lexi Stout, 33, follows around 35 friends and family as she “sniffs.”
“It's like a social media channel. I go from Tiktok to Instagram and then I go [to Find My Friends]. So it's like a strange rotation of 'what are you guys doing?',” Upper Westsider said.
“I'll catch my own [out of town] I have a lot of McDonald's drive-thru friends. “Would you like to welcome me a burger?” Stout said in a joke, pursuing buds on a map “is like a game to me.”
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She was also caught up in a nasty standoff when the friendship ended – find the timestamp of my discovery when someone stops sharing their place with you on the iMessage chat.
“I always didn't want her to know where I was, but I didn't want to be an AB either —- Ch,” she said. “It's really like knocking on the door.”
Stout had enough liquid courage one night to close the door to friendship. “I don't need that safety from that person anymore,” she said.
Helping older parents
Farrah Falk, a millennial who lives in Los Angeles, first shared her location with family and friends in 2019, allowing her to be tracked on her solo Europe backpacking trip.
However, after his mother Myron G. in the '70s, he was diagnosed with several illnesses the following year, confirming that the app had become part of FAWX's routine.
“She got sick and more concerned about checking me in. It was a bit of a ritual for me,” the 30-year-old told the post.
Farrar makes sure that his mother, who lives nationwide in Richmond, Virginia, is safe at home from long drives to on-time doctor appointments.
“Even though we're 3,000 miles away, my mother is like my emergency contact,” she told the Post, explaining that even from all over the country knows who will call and what information is needed in an emergency.
“We can have that connection without being too over each other.”
