Becoming our own spies: The rise and rise of surveillance culture

Gen Z loves tracking each other's location, but are they inadvertently creating a surveillance nightmare?

“Location data are very valuable to corporations.” Pic: Unsplash

Some people cure their boredom by flicking through Netflix for a series to binge. Others scroll through short-form content on social media until their fingers go numb. Sophie, a 19-year-old barista from London, checks to see the precise location of her friends and family, which is shared reciprocally, on a 24/7 basis, using a range of smartphone apps. 

Sounds weird? Sophie isn’t alone. Location-sharing apps like Life360, Find My Friends and Snapchat Maps, which allow users to share their real-time location with selected contacts via GPS and other sensors, have swept up a Gen Z audience, who choose to share their location with friends, parents and partners – and not just in specific moments, all the time.

According to a report by Life360, about 70 per cent of Gen Z use specific location-sharing apps, and one in two has more than 10 contacts on Find My Friends. 

Sophie views the locations of her loved ones, either on Snap Maps (a feature on the instant messaging platform Snapchat) or Find My (Apple’s pre-installed location-sharing app) “a couple times a day, mostly for safety purposes and protectiveness, but also, sometimes, [I’m] just nosy,” she tells The Lead. 

Location-sharing apps are not new. Life360, touted as an app for families, has been used for safety purposes by parents for well over a decade. But the way these apps are being used now, particularly by young people like Sophie, is changing. 

The rise of 24/7 location sharing

I am 27 and, anecdotally, I have noticed the number of people in my age group and younger casually requesting 24/7 access to my whereabouts is increasing. As someone who came of age when Snapchat launched its location-sharing feature back in 2017, I swiftly grew out of the desire to see where my friends were. But I never anticipated it would become so ubiquitous. 

The most common reason people choose to share their location in certain scenarios is to feel safe. Women in particular give friends access to their live location when going on first dates (in fact, Bumble recently added date location-sharing as an in-app feature), or on their way home from a night out.

But when it comes to offering continuous, uninterrupted access to your location, there are other factors at play for Gen Z. The main one is friendship. A survey by Bumble For Friends found that 54 per cent of respondents from this generation view sharing their location as a form of affection, with 51 per cent perceiving it as the ultimate sign of friendship. In romantic relationships, too, it can be seen to denote trust. A recent Australian survey found that nearly one in five young people think it’s okay to track their partner whenever they want.

There are also clear risks with a partner being able to track your every move. The tracking technology can be easily exploited by abusers to exert control and facilitate domestic abuse. The same Australian study mentioned above linked location-sharing apps with an increased risk of coercive control. But more than 13 per cent of the 2,000 adults surveyed said it was “reasonable” for a partner to monitor them.

A 2023 study found that convenience and logistics play a role in why people seem to be so relaxed about using location-tracking apps. David Lyon, a sociologist who has been researching surveillance since the mid-1980s, tells The Lead: “The convenience of being able to find friends in crowded locations – music audiences and the like – factors in the decision [to share location].”

For some, the use of location-sharing for convenience is pushed to its limits. My flatmate once asked me to share my location so he wouldn’t have to message me first to see if I was home and wanted a chat. Others use it as a tool to know when to start cooking dinner or to meet their partner at the train station. This use of digital tools to make life easier, says Lyon, is likely a learned behaviour. 

He adds that place, rather than time, is now the main form of coordination when meeting with friends, allowing people to turn up to a location (like the pub or the park) at any time. “On-the-fly spatial coordination means specific places become tremendously important, as the device allows for switching plans of where to meet at a moment’s notice,” he says. “Serendipity plays a part.” 

For young people who have grown up in a hyperconnected world, sharing data online is normal. The Bumble for Friends Survey found that 49 per cent of users check Find My or other location-sharing services as much as they do other social media apps, suggesting that checking on others’ locations is more of a habit than a conscious choice. Sophie admits that checking in on her friends and family has become “habitual” – “it’s sort of become part of a routine, if you will.” 

Lyon notes that early versions of location-sharing apps (such as Foursquare) had a “game-like character that appeals to more than mere check-ins.” Zooming in and out on the map, tapping on friends’ accounts to see where they are, may just be another tool for quelling boredom.

Then, of course, there’s anxiety. Alice*, 26, from London (who didn’t want to be named), told me she checked her ex-boyfriend’s location “a hundred times a day,” after they broke up, in a bid to soothe the fear that he was out meeting someone new. For Sophie, checking the locations of her loved ones “gives a sense of peace and relief that the people are safe where they should be.”

Opting in to a big brother society

The majority of smartphone apps are designed to be “sticky”. Apps use certain features to keep users engaged – think push notifications that trigger reward patterns in the brain; the infinite scroll features on short-form content apps, which offer unpredictable rewards and keep people locked into scrolling. They do this because, while apps are free for consumers to use, they make their money from in-app advertisements and, vitally, selling their users' data.

“Platforms create the possibilities for mutual tracking, because these yield valuable consumer data about the locations at which young people are likely to congregate – and thus consume coffee, hear music, or engage in some other potentially profitable activity,” says Lyon. “Location data are very valuable to corporations!”

It is not a secret that location-sharing apps are tracking and storing our location data. Life360 offers a yearly “wrapped” feature, which shows users where they spent the most time. In 2021 it was revealed that Life360 was selling precise location data to a dozen location data brokers who sold the data on to '“anyone and everyone.” It was one of the biggest providers of location data in the industry. (The company now only sells precise data to one broker and aggregate data to another).

This is a form of commercial surveillance, says Lyon, “in which the data gathered are analysed by specific algorithms intended to profile users and to rate their value to the company or companies involved.” While these are much more subtle than the in-your-face fears of stalking or other physical targeting which could arise from 24/7 location-sharing, he says, they are just as insidious. 

“[These practices] contribute to the ‘social sorting’ of persons as consumers, which gives different scores to different users (or mobile apps), leading to their being greater or lesser access to certain types of consumer goods and services,” he explains. “They invisibly exacerbate social differences, deepening social divides and increasing vulnerabilities in certain segments of the population.”

From vertical to horizontal surveillance 

While surveillance has historically been from the top down – think live facial recognition used by police to find criminals in a crowd, or CCTV in public places – digital products have enabled a culture of horizontal – or peer-to-peer surveillance. This is when people who have equal power in a situation (such as two friends) collect data on one another. As Spanish academic Alberto Hermida, noted in a paper published in 2019, when people engage in horizontal methods of surveillance, “citizens… become their own spies.”

Knowledge is power, but when it comes to location-sharing, says Ben Marder, an academic with expertise in digital marketing, consumer behaviour and social media, “there's a certain level of expectation that if you want to know someone’s location, you’ll reciprocate where your location is.” As Lyon noted, this is the exact mechanism by which companies can get their hands on our lucrative location data, without having to try.

“So,” he says, “you’re trading your privacy for the benefit of knowledge.”  thus facilitating the work of those interested in their information, but also leave a digital footprint, allowing access to their personal privacy and constant tracking.”

Surveillance culture isn’t going anywhere. As Marder notes, with more enticing consumer surveillance tech coming out (such as Ray-Ban’s AI and camera glasses, or Raw’s The Ring, which gives couples access to one another’s biometrics), “things are only going to get worse”. Indeed, if we can’t beat surveillance culture, we may just be tempted to join it. But let’s not forget we have a choice.■

About the author: Ella is a freelance journalist specialising in worker's rights, housing, youth culture, social affairs and lifestyle. You can find her work in Tribune Magazine, Huck Magazine, Novara Media, VICE, Dazed, metro.co.uk and - most importantly - here at The Lead.