It seems like a good idea in theory but there are so many issues with this. First of all, it’s a good way to keep track of your friends and make sure they are safe, but at the same time if a stranger gets access to a phone they will know where all their friends are. That’d be a wet dream for stalkers. Secondly, it seems like it would be a good way to make sure your friends aren’t doing anything shady, but that also means if they are doing something that they don’t want their friends to see they could just leave their phone at home which is very dangerous. And if you just disable the tracking that immediately breaks the trust of the friendship even if it was just over being embarrassed about going to McDonalds three times in one day.
I get it if it’s a tight friend group, but as you get older you really start to notice some of your friends are just shitty people. I cut ties with more toxic people in my 20s than I ever thought I would have to. I could only imagine what some of them may have done if they could track my every move. I’ve had people I consider friends break into my house before I ever even noticed anything toxic about them.
It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.
I go out without my phone pretty often just because it’s not with me all the time, and I haven’t experienced said danger, although I agree that it could be inconvenient in the wrong circumstances.
If cell phones weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now I can definitely see it not being an issue in the past. But with literally everything being online and on our phones I could easily see something going badly. Like, I don’t think you can even buy maps at gas stations or rest stops in the US these days and those things used to be everywhere. And without being able to use GPS, call someone, and in some peoples cases won’t even be able to buy anything since there are so many people that rely on things like Apple Pay, there are so many things that can go wrong with one point of failure. Most people wouldn’t even know what day of the month it is or even how much money they have without their phone.
One of the reasons I keep a map in my car, which I’ve actually had to use a couple times when my phone died on a long drive.
Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.
You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.
That’s an interesting point you made about disabling the tracking breaking trust with friends. Everyone is entitled to private moments, and it is strange that friends would feel entitled to your location, particularly when the focus should primarily be about the safety of the group. I suppose we have young people who have come of age in an era when they’ve had little digital privacy. This doesn’t just include corporations and governments but also from their guardians. I could see how this may seem normal to them, but it seems unhealthy from where I’m standing.
I think what my point is mostly about is that once one person does it for an arbitrary reason then everyone does it for an arbitrary reason. I guess I’d say that it breaks the trust of the commitment very easily. I’ve seen it with similar situations all the time. I have a discord server where I play games with all my friends and one day one of the people in the server disabled the ability to see what they were playing. Next thing you know everyone is hiding their activity and nobody knows what anyone is doing. Instead of being a feature that was sometimes disabled it turned into a feature that is sometimes enabled instead. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it’s the way things go.
It seems like a good idea in theory but there are so many issues with this. First of all, it’s a good way to keep track of your friends and make sure they are safe, but at the same time if a stranger gets access to a phone they will know where all their friends are. That’d be a wet dream for stalkers. Secondly, it seems like it would be a good way to make sure your friends aren’t doing anything shady, but that also means if they are doing something that they don’t want their friends to see they could just leave their phone at home which is very dangerous. And if you just disable the tracking that immediately breaks the trust of the friendship even if it was just over being embarrassed about going to McDonalds three times in one day.
I get it if it’s a tight friend group, but as you get older you really start to notice some of your friends are just shitty people. I cut ties with more toxic people in my 20s than I ever thought I would have to. I could only imagine what some of them may have done if they could track my every move. I’ve had people I consider friends break into my house before I ever even noticed anything toxic about them.
It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.
I go out without my phone pretty often just because it’s not with me all the time, and I haven’t experienced said danger, although I agree that it could be inconvenient in the wrong circumstances.
If cell phones weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now I can definitely see it not being an issue in the past. But with literally everything being online and on our phones I could easily see something going badly. Like, I don’t think you can even buy maps at gas stations or rest stops in the US these days and those things used to be everywhere. And without being able to use GPS, call someone, and in some peoples cases won’t even be able to buy anything since there are so many people that rely on things like Apple Pay, there are so many things that can go wrong with one point of failure. Most people wouldn’t even know what day of the month it is or even how much money they have without their phone.
One of the reasons I keep a map in my car, which I’ve actually had to use a couple times when my phone died on a long drive.
Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.
You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.
That’s an interesting point you made about disabling the tracking breaking trust with friends. Everyone is entitled to private moments, and it is strange that friends would feel entitled to your location, particularly when the focus should primarily be about the safety of the group. I suppose we have young people who have come of age in an era when they’ve had little digital privacy. This doesn’t just include corporations and governments but also from their guardians. I could see how this may seem normal to them, but it seems unhealthy from where I’m standing.
I think what my point is mostly about is that once one person does it for an arbitrary reason then everyone does it for an arbitrary reason. I guess I’d say that it breaks the trust of the commitment very easily. I’ve seen it with similar situations all the time. I have a discord server where I play games with all my friends and one day one of the people in the server disabled the ability to see what they were playing. Next thing you know everyone is hiding their activity and nobody knows what anyone is doing. Instead of being a feature that was sometimes disabled it turned into a feature that is sometimes enabled instead. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it’s the way things go.
A friend turning off gps when it’s inconvenient wouldn’t make me distrust them.