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At any given time, lots of people can pinpoint James Tatter's exact location. How many people? Not even he knew. Until we asked him to count them up. Wow, it's two, 63, 64, 65, 66 people where we can both see each other's location. Jesus, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41. So 44 people who have my location, but I don't have theirs. people have James' location on Apple's Find My app, more commonly referred to by its old name, Find My Friends.
they must have lifted the max because for a while i could no longer like if i wanted to share my location with someone i would get a notification being like you've reached the maximum you need to unshare your location with someone else before sharing your location with this person. Emory is one of the sheeple out there, the apple sheeple. Can you provide a visual description?
Find My for my fellow discerning Android users, Amory? Well, I am not actually a user of this particular feature, as we will get to, but Find My comes pre-installed on iPhones. And when you open the app, you either see a map of your other Apple devices. or a map of people who share their location with you.
and you can zoom in to get a pretty exact location. Like, James' friends can see James is in Austin, Texas. James is in his apartment building. James is in a specific part of his apartment building. We'll come back to that. James is 27 years old, and he's been a marked man for almost a decade.
When did you start following people on Find My Friends? When did this become a part of your life? Sometime in college, like all of my housemates, we would all track each other. Just honestly, it started, I think, because we would lose our phones all the time.
very quickly went from like maybe seven or eight of us sharing our location to you know 40 or 50 we did have a random drinking game where you had to like if you lost you had to scroll through your contacts and just share your location with whoever you landed on and so that probably boosted the list by like 15 and Some of those people are still to this day. They just know where I am at all times. They don't know why. Huge public school. So University of North Carolina spread out over a few miles.
A lot of my friends lived on South Campus, which was a 45-minute walk to North Campus. So you need to know, have they left their dorm yet? Or whose house are they at tonight? And texting people to see, are they in my neck of the woods? So I think from a social perspective, it was always nice to see where all your...
your little Sims are on a map. Sims, you know, the popular computer game that debuted when James was just a toddler, where the only object is really just to direct the group of virtual people you create. your little sims as they go about their day. Today, James still uses Find My to see who's around to hang out, just on a global scale. He works for an educational travel company, organizing international student tours. So he spends a lot of time on the road.
It is really nice to know if I have a close friend or a co-worker that's nearby. I've gotten lunch with a friend in Barcelona because we opened up Find My Friends and realized we were both there. You know me, I love an impromptu hangout. But this conversation with James made me feel like...
I'm not trying to be an old man. I feel like I keep saying like the old man technology bad comments. Somebody should make a horror movie with a find my friends scene. That would be really good. Honestly, same. It has never occurred to me to share my location indefinitely with anyone, not even my husband.
It just seems like having all of your friends know what you're doing and who you're with could get awkward. I understand the upside, but I also feel like for me, I immediately think of this like... other side of the coin which is like people saying like, I'm on my way. And you're like, no, you're not, dude. You're still at the dorm. Or people being like,
oh yeah, sorry, can't hang out. I'm on South Campus. And you're like, no, you're not. You're on North Campus. Do you know what I mean? I feel like there's another side of it. 100%, if you like lying, sharing your location with hundreds of people is a terrible idea. In addition to being a prodigious Find My Friends user, James is also the younger brother of Endless Thread producer Grace Tatter. Do you follow her on Find My Friends, if that's the way to describe it?
yeah i think so i know for sure that she can track me i assume i can track her grace Can he? He can, along with 10 close friends, plus a smattering of other relatives. And I also feel weird about it. Yeah, why do you feel also weird about it, Grace? I mean, for a lot of reasons. I feel weird about giving up my privacy. I feel weird about how it can affect social dynamics. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to look into them.
There are more than a billion iPhone users around the world. They all have Apple's Find My app. And increasingly, people, especially younger people like James, seem to be using Find My in a new way. Today, Grace is going to explain to us why so many people are using it perhaps differently than Apple originally intended. and how that might be affecting our relationships offline.
Exhibit A, thousands of TikToks. The first thing I do on Saturday morning is I check my friend's location. I open find my friends and they are like my personal little sims. She said she wasn't going to see her ex and where is she at? Her ex's house. And she's going to lie to me about it. I bet she's going to lie to me. We now have... have the superpower to see where all of our friends are all of the time.
But should we? From WBUR in Boston, this is Endless Thread. I'm Amory. I forgot I even had Find My on my phone. Severson. I'm Ben Oldman Johnson. And in today's episode, we find our friends. Okay, Ben and Amory, as you know, I have been thinking about this for a while, and... Why this idea of tracking each other seems so normal, even to me, even though I also think it's a little weird. I wanted to understand why we started to do this in the first place.
So I went to talk to a guy who has literally based his whole career on this technology. Dennis Crowley dreamed of a world where we'd all be carrying little maps with our friends years before it was actually possible. Back in the early 2000s, Dennis was in his 20s, and he was living in Manhattan, building software. making software for Palm Pilots. Do you know what Palm Pilot is? With a little stylus? Yeah, it's like a cell phone that doesn't work. These were different times.
People were just starting to carry mobile phones and the phones could get like four lines on the screen of just like text-based menus. Like no pictures, no colors, no... Nothing like that. Post.com bust, Dennis and a bunch of his buddies got laid off. And he thought...
It would be kind of cool to know where everyone was hanging out at any given moment, to look at a map and see all of his friends on it, like in the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter had this magical map, the Marauder's map, of like where everyone was in Hogwarts. As many people will remember, in the third Harry Potter book, Harry is given this magical map that allows him to see where everyone at his wizarding school is. So you mean this map shows everyone?
Everyone? Everyone. Where they are. What they're doing. Every minute of every day. Brilliant. I remember sitting on a beach reading that book being like, someone needs to make this thing for New York. And you just know where everyone is all the time. In the year 2000, the idea of a map on your cell phone updating in real time with your friends' locations might as well have been magic. But it gave Dennis...
The idea was like, if you broadcasted your location, maybe someone would come and meet up with you. Basically, he builds a piece of software that sends text blasts to his friends, announcing where in the city he's hanging out. So, if they feel so inclined, they can join. I built it for like my 10 friends at the time. And it just...
It was kind of nothing for a couple of years. But then when I went to grad school, I got connected with my buddy Alex and we decided to turn it into like a real project. This is Dennis's buddy, Alex Rayner. A big motivator was always... Can we build software that... creates serendipity. Alex and Dennis. named the project Dodgeball. Which sounds like the opposite of what it really is, right?
I hear Dodgeball. Dodgeball, you're trying not to get tagged by the ball. Dodgeball is the app that I want where it's like, oh no, there's a person that I know in that coffee shop. Off I go. Online mapping, at least as we know it, wasn't really a thing back then. You could use MapQuest for directions, but there weren't digital maps that showed you local businesses. Alex and Dennis had to manually build and update this huge database of places in New York.
So to use the software, you'd send a text with your location. I'm at, you know, the NYU library. With the at symbol, which Dennis assured me at the time was a cutting-edge use. I'm at The Magician, which is a bar in the Lower East Side. I'm at Ace Bar. So if we got a message from you... We would know, okay, this is a phone number we recognize because they have an account. This is a venue we recognize because it's in our database.
Let's find this person's friends associated with the account. Send them a text message that says, Grace is at The Magician. You should stop by and say, hi, here's the address. Sounds kind of dumb now. Like, yeah, I get a message of where you are. But like when people got these messages, you kind of dropped whatever you were doing and you were like, oh, someone's over here. Let's just go over there. Sometimes there was an exponential effect.
Like, Dennis would say that he was at The Magician. Five of his friends would come, check in, and say they were at The Magician. You have these certain nights where just... 20, 30, 40 people would show up at the same place is because everyone had this superpower of knowing where everyone else was. I can get down with this I think because if you're checking into a place
you're inviting other people to join you. It's not like, oh, I was just trying to have a drink by myself on a Wednesday, you know? It's like, which I've never ever done in my life. Emory loves to drink by herself on a Wednesday. To Dennis, Alex, and their friends, it felt like magic. But not everyone felt that way. I remember demoing this to people, like investors and reporters at the time, and they're like,
This is crazy. You want everyone to know where you are. I'm like, well, why would I not? I'm not hiding. But do you want them all to come here? No, of course I don't want them to come here. Well, why would you broadcast it? Some of them will come here and that's more fun than none of them coming here. And it was just a really hard. concept for people to wrap their heads around. Even the people who got it encountered some problems. We had a bunch of almost like social bugs.
at the time. Sometimes someone would send you a friend request, and it's like, you're not going to deny it, so you're going to approve it, but you don't really want to hang out with that person. But that's the person that ends up showing up all the time.
This is the flip side, right? Like, this is exactly why I would not broadcast to everyone or I would probably just like send a good old fashioned text to the people who I wanted to show up, you know, and say like, hey, I'm at this place. And that way you don't have the.
What do you call it? A social bug? It's one of those things that like it works in like a perfect world where like everybody wants to hang out with each other and everybody's down to clown. But like everybody doesn't always want to hang out with each other. You know what I mean?
Yeah, and Dennis and Alex tried to take that into account when building Dodgeball. We built a way for people to be friends, but then we also enabled a way for you to block them, right? So like, all right, I have 100 friends. But when I send my message, it's only going to go out to 99 because I don't want this person to show up. They're all just human problems moved to software.
Dodgeball was bought by Google in 2005. Then Google shut it down. And it was a few years before they launched their own location-sharing search. Google Latitude, which you almost certainly don't remember because it never really became a thing like Find My did. And that's because in the meantime, Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduces us to the iPhone.
Back when Dennis and Alex built Dodgeball, everything had to be text message-based because most people couldn't download third-party software onto their cell phones. But now, with Apple's App Store, all it takes is a tap. It's that simple to put the app right on the phone. In 2009, Dennis starts a company called Foursquare. Foursquare is basically
for smartphones. Your friends can see when you check into locations like restaurants and bars. By 2009 online location services were much more sophisticated. No one had to manually maintain a database of businesses. But we still didn't quite have the magical map Dennis had pictured until an Apple intern, who kept losing their phone and couch cushions, relatable, made a suggestion. Find my phone. A map that showed the exact location of your device.
right down to the room in your apartment where you left it. A few years later, Apple took that feature a step further. Now, find my iPhone is really great. But what if you could find your family and friends? That was Apple's famous executive at EQ. And this was the new app. Find my friends. So now when I'm in Disneyland, for example, I can easily see where my family is. I can even see if my son made it to school okay today.
He does seem to be presenting this as like a very practical, this is how you can keep track of where your family is, as opposed to James Tatter, who, as he told us earlier, is following 100 plus. People. Yeah, as far as I can tell, Apple doesn't see Find My Friends as a social networking tool. In 2015, Apple rolls it into the same app as Find My Phone and pre-installs it on all new iPhones, so it can't be deleted.
A couple of years later, Google adds location sharing to Maps and Snapchat launches Snap Maps. They introduce it with a commercial showing two women wondering how to spend their evening before consulting their snap map with all of their friends' locations. Looks like everyone's at a show. They haven't started yet. Let's go. These are the people that don't get invited to the show for reasons. Oh, no. But while Snapchat is clearly a social media app, Find My Friends is not.
It doesn't have a news feed or a way to engage with the content being displayed. We often think of our tether to social media being the dopamine from likes and views. But no one likes your location in Find My Friends, and you can't see how many people are checking in on you at any given moment. All right, that's creepy. I'm saying it. I don't like it. You want to know who's creeping on you? I don't want anyone to be able to creep on me in the first place, but...
Yeah, just the idea that people are like watching you move through the world, even just loved ones feels... There's an ick factor for me, I gotta say. You know, I just don't want to know because I feel like I'd be really disappointed. Nobody's creeping on me. I really wish people would care about what I'm doing. Find My Friends is different in another way too. With Dodgeball, you had to text to share your location, right? Even with Foursquare, you have to actively check into a place.
But once you accept someone's request, Find My is always running. which gets us closer to a real-life magical map but can also come with some real social buffs. as Alex described them. More about those, including the time my brother James encountered a social bug so bad, he had to stop sharing his location after a break.
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Okay, so we're now living in a world where we can all know exactly where each other is at all times. Which to some people, old people like me, sounds like a scary movie and is... for other people, something that they totally volunteeringly opt into. Like Grace Tatter, who uses Find My Friends with how many people, Grace? I have 16 people on Find My Friends.
All but one person is a mutual follow. Isabel, if you're listening, I did notice that you stopped sharing your location with me while I was checking for this episode. Oh, Isabel. Isabel on blast. Isabel. That's fine, though. That's fine, though. I respect your privacy. But I definitely did not always use Find My Friends. I had an iPhone for years before it occurred to me. Okay, when did you start using?
OK, so this was a few years ago and I just gone through a breakup. So my boyfriend had just moved out of our apartment and it was the first time in my life that I was living alone. And I just kind of realized that like. nobody knows when I get home or if I get home or not. Like if I go for a run, like no one knows if I make it back. So I started sharing it with just a few people for safety.
But then something kind of funny started happening. Other friends would hear about it that some of us had each other's locations and they would feel left out so I would start sharing my location with them too and so now for one of my friend groups pretty much
where like the bulk of us or everyone who has an iPhone is sharing their location with each other and we're kind of using it differently than I used to. I wouldn't say that it's purely safety anymore. So like right now I can see my friend Thompson. is working from home today and he was like a few blocks away from me. So maybe since I know he's not in the office, like right after work, I could be like, hey, do you want to go on like a 30 minute walk? Oh, this is interesting.
James is in Santa Cruz, Ecuador. I didn't know that. So maybe I'll ask him what's up in Ecuador. Is there like a blanket of comfort that rests upon you using this app? there is something just satisfying right now. Like I just see all these little dots around my part of Brooklyn and I'm like, that's, you know, that's my community. That's my people. Just like having an ant farm when you're a kid. My little ants, exactly.
Even though I'm clearly using this differently than I originally started to, kind of more like dodgeball in some ways, like a lot of times make plans. I've been wondering if it's accurate for me to call this a social media app. Like, that is how we're using it now, right? So I called up Dheeraj Murthy. He's a professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Texas at Austin. And his main area of research is social media.
have always been social. That's just part of our cognitive evolution, really. So human beings are going to take any technology on hand to update other human beings. Sure, Find My Friends is a more passive update than a letter or postcard or even an Instagram post. But it's still communicating something to people. When people update, they're reinforcing that community, they're strengthening ties. It's saying, here I am, I exist.
look at me, but also I want to hear about you. Theater Edge said we can still glean a lot from passive updates, or at least assume a lot. All well under the guise that we're not updating at all. And that might be important to some people, especially younger people, because they don't want to seem like they're trying too hard. There seems to be this idea of like being aggressive on social media is a negative and they seem to.
say, oh, millennials do that. Millennials do that. But we don't. We tend to be, you know, kind of more mellow and we'll just, you know, quietly update that way. There's also this sense that Find My Friends is more pure than other social media platforms. At this point, we are all super used to and aware of the idea that we are passively updating companies with our location to sell us at. But there are no ads on Find My and sharing your location with your friends
feels less icky than sharing it with for-profit companies. But Diraj points out that this app does not exist outside of market force. Let's say all your friends are in Find My and you're an Android user. Well, it's going to probably pull you towards Apple. So there is You know, there is a capitalistic force occurring here that isn't just purely surveillance capitalism, but at the same time, we don't know what technology companies are doing with all those locations.
I might think I'm just sharing my location with 16 people, but I'm assuming that they're the only people. looking at their phones right but what if their phone gets stolen or seized somehow anyone who has access to their phones is also going to be able to see my exact location and I'm just sharing who these people are these like 16 of my closest confidants and relatives.
with Apple. I think that that is a huge level of trust that's placed in technology companies to say, here are my hundred closest confidants in the world. Here you go. And as I learned, sharing your location with one person can easily lead to sharing your location with another.
and another. If you start sharing your location with lots of people you may you may reduce your bar right as to like like if you're just sharing with your immediate family that's what you're saying is the criteria but if you open it up to a larger thing and that person falls out with you or whatever and you forget you're sharing location, what does that mean?
There are no exaggeration, a full episode's worth of reasons some people might be wary of being surveilled, even if they are participating in the surveillance, even if they're surveilling right back. gender, immigration status, race, age, Dierrej says that all of these factors might affect how comfortable we are with this technology.
you know, particularly vulnerable, they're probably less likely, but maybe they also, you know, want to for network and community. Dyrdhaj has a serious shortcut that causes his phone to start recording and sharing his location with a confidant if he gets pulled over by the police. It's not a social media in that way, but it's using these technologies for protection in that case, which is exactly the same technologies, just in a very different tooling of that.
In my experience, at least, the safety aspect is inextricable from the social aspect. Location sharing has become symbolic. You're a person I'd need if something terrible happened. You're a person I trust. But if it's hard to isolate the safety aspects of Find My Friends from the social, it's also hard to isolate the control aspect. I love my friends, obviously, and I don't think they're trying to control me when they check in to ask what I could possibly be doing.
Jersey City on a Sunday afternoon, for example. What were you doing in Jersey City on a Sunday afternoon? That's for me to know, Beth. Oh, come on. But as I've added more people to the app, I have on occasion become self-conscious about my behavior in a way I might not have in a pre-location sharing world. I do think access to this one piece of information might sometimes make us feel entitled to more information. Grace, this reminds me of something that your brother James told us.
like a very particular thing that happened to him. I've only ever had one time where I would say, I was like, oh, this backfired, and I actually am going to stop sharing my location with you because of how you use this. He was hanging out with his girlfriend Perry. They had just started dating. Someone reached out and was like, hey, are you seeing Perry?
And I was like, how do you, like, we hadn't talked about that with anyone. How do you know that? And she was like, I zoomed in on your location and could tell that you were at her apartment. James and Perry live in the same building, so you'd have to get really close on that map and zoom way in to be able to tell that James was hanging out in her apartment, not his.
i was like that's really annoying and like i honestly just wish you hadn't asked because we weren't talking about it with other people yet and so i was like it It's one thing to, you knew that information. And at the end of the day, like you do have my location that's on me. But I was like, if I wanted to have that conversation, we would have. And so now you're using my location to like put me in situations I don't want to be in. Yeah, it's like the technology enables us to be this nosy.
But it doesn't mean that we should be, you know. Yeah. And once people have crossed the line or even if your relationship has just changed with someone and you don't really want them to have your location anymore, it can be really awkward to say that. Exhibit B, many more TikToks.
Dying to know who the messy little employee was at Apple that was like, do you know what would be a great function of Find My, like when two people are sharing their location? Let's put a billboard in their text conversation that says, so-and-so, stop sharing their location.
with you. Cause like, I bet that will cause zero conflict. All I need to be able to do is to turn off my location for an individual person without it sending a text message. I'm just like, at what point do we say, okay, that was cute. That was fun. That's enough. Yeah, it's really hard to put the genie back in the bottle, right? I think about that at a larger level too, not just with Find My, but like...
you know, Maps uses your location, your ride hailing app or ride sharing app uses your location. There are all these apps now that are like, way more useful when you have location data attached to it, right? It's much more convenient for the user. And we've all been so acclimated to this world in which we're expected. to give up this information from jump. It feels weird when we claw it back to ourselves and to others, and it can feel hard. Yeah, this is like...
tech applied and amplifying a problem that really is as old as time, which is just that relationships are hard. Friendships are hard. They're very hard to end. I'm, you know, old lady here again, but I say you just got to talk it out. Got to talk it out with your friends. Say, hey, I'm like not sharing my location with as many people anymore. And that's that.
Right? Yeah, that's basically what James did. He was pretty direct with his friend who zoomed in super far on his location. You can't be subtle. You can't just like quietly stop sharing your location because it sends a notification in your text chat. So I did, I knew that was going to happen. So I did text them ahead of time to be like, Hey, like, don't want you to think that we're
not still cool to talk or whatever, but that did make me a little uncomfortable. And just for my own kind of peace of mind, I'm going to stop sharing my location with you. Like, let me know if you want to talk more about that. And they were like, yeah, that was probably a little over the line. I get it. We asked James if he has any hard and fast rules for Find My.
Yeah, it's funny that you call them rules. I mean, one of the Apple added a new feature within the last year where now if you open a text conversation with someone whose location you have, it has their location right there. Like you don't even need to click out of the text feed. Oh, wow. i don't know if you can see that but like underneath this contact name like in the text feed it has her like cambridge massachusetts so that has changed things a little bit but
I do think there's some unspoken etiquette to it. I've never like discussed that with anyone of like, don't check someone's location. I mean, you can do it on accident or you can do it out of curiosity, but like if you're doing it for a purpose, yeah, like you need to text them. Otherwise you're just a stalker. Like, don't be a stalker, I think is the one piece of etiquette with this. Well, a big plus one to that. But also, I'd say I think where I've landed with all of this is.
The safety piece resonates with me so much right now that... I think I actually am going to start sharing my location with one person. Me. Grace Tatter. I'm going to share it with my sister because I so worry about this eroding the communication and the trust. that I'm not willing to do that to...
my marriage and some of my other close friendships. Like, that is a genie that I do not want to take out of the bottle and then have to try to put back in. I would much rather just have... one person you know my sister my best friend for life know where I am if somebody needs that information and
I think for all my other relationships, I just, this is like a good reminder to... over communicate not in an annoying way but in a like i am intentionally reaching out to you because i'm actively thinking of you and i want to know what you're up to or How you're doing? So yeah, this has been illuminating. I'm always fascinated by the ways in which humans come up with new uses for technology that we build.
And sometimes I'm horrified, but most of the time I'm just fascinated by it. And so I want to and do effectively. believe that um that this could be really fun and like i said before like i love spontaneous hang That's one of my favorite kinds of hang, right? I can imagine Find Mai as something that increases the serendipity of life.
in a way that I could really appreciate and value as somebody who moves through the world and really enjoys spending time with the people that I care about and who care about me. And I think... thinking carefully about the way that we interact with each other is made more difficult by technology that is based on convenience. truly intended to end this by going through all of the people in my
Find my list and hitting stop sharing location. I thought that would be a really nice little narrative bow on this episode. It's not too late. We'll wait right here, Grace. I know. We believe in you. But I can't do it. I do kind of like this little visual of my community and where I fit geographically into that. You love the ant farm after all, Grace. I love the ant farm. You love your Sims. I guess I do. And honestly, y'all, what can I say? I just need to know who's around for a walk.
Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written, produced, reported, and found by Grace Tatter. It was edited by Meg Kramer, co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Emery Sievertson, and your old friend.
Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is production manager Paul Vykus, managing producer Sumitajoshi, Frannie Monahan, and Dean Russell. Thank you to the many people I talked to for this, including my brother, James Tatter, Dennis Crowley, Alex Rayner, Dieridge Murthy, the media psychologist Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Center for Surveillance Studies at the University of Aarhus, Anders Albrechtsland, and Zoe Hitzig, whose essay in The Drift, On the Grid,
How surveillance became a love language is linked in the show notes. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between sisterly surveillance and the surveillance state. You cannot find us on Find My Friends. But you can email us at Endless Thread. at wbur.org with all your unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet.