Instagram Map stirs debate on location-sharing and privacy among Gen Z

Instagram's location tool challenges Gen Z's trust in digital privacy and connection. Illustration / Katty Huertas, The Washington Post

It wasn’t shocking that Danni Gladden’s mum tracked her. Plenty of the parents of kids at her high school tracked them, whether that was through Apple’s Find My iPhone app or via Life360, which provided live updates on their teenagers’ whereabouts. At first, after Snapchat unveiled the “Snap Map” in 2017, Gladden’s mum wanted her teen daughter’s location on the social media platform.

“It was frustrating when I was that age,” Gladden said, noting she resisted her mum’s Snapchat requests. “I kept lying, like, ‘It’s not working. I don’t know why it’s not working,’ because I didn’t want her to know where I was. So then she randomly was like, ‘Oh, I got this app, Life360.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, great.’”

But as high school proceeded, Gladden began using Apple’s location app – rebranded as Find My in 2019 – to keep up with her friends. For a generation raised on GPS (Global Positioning System), sharing your location is essential for socialising, being nosey and making sure everyone arrives at their destination safely. Most notably, it can solidify which friendships are most important.

“It just has a lot to do with the generation we’re in, where it feels like your friendship is stronger when you have someone’s location,” Gladden, now 22, explained. “It just feels like you’re trusting them.”

Plenty of young adults like Gladden treat Find My like another social media tool, a place to find out what’s going on with the people you care about. While Snapchat had made location tracking a part of its personalised appeal, it was only a matter of time before other social media companies followed. Late last week, Meta announced the Instagram Map, a new feature where users can opt into sharing their last active location. But even as Gen Z adopts tracking apps, they remain controversial, especially as Instagram Map can share their location beyond close friends if they’re not careful about the settings.

Location apps often get installed because of parents’ safety concerns. As those teenagers who often grumbled about being surveilled by their parents grew up and moved out, they began using Find My or Life360 to check on their friends in potentially risky situations. Laura Kelly, a 23-year-old who works as a prison re-entry case manager in Boston, shares her location with her friends in case of a potential emergency, such as when someone goes missing from a large group or if they’re Ubering home after drinking too much. Over time, she’s amassed 45 people on her Find My account.

“There’s been times where one of my friends got way too drunk and was a wanderer, so we were like, ‘Oh, just checked her location and tracked her down,’” Kelly said. “I found her on a stump and I was like, ‘Thank God.’ It reminded me why I do it.”

As Gen Z’s parents and grandparents get older, the roles have reversed, with their children now keeping tabs on them. It’s helpful for the same reasons that tracking friends can be, whether that’s figuring out if someone is running late or going somewhere unexpected. For Kelly, looking at Find My is useful to see if her parents are busy. “Whenever I call them, I’ll check beforehand to see if they’re home because I feel like they’re more likely to answer,” she said. “If they don’t answer my call, I’ll look and be like, ‘Well, what are they doing if they’re not talking to me?’”

For many, tracking a friend’s location is just an extension of stalking someone’s social media. You don’t have to ask to know what swank new restaurant your friends are trying, where they’re seeing a concert that night or if they’re hanging out with your other friends that you have on Find My. The Instagram Map correctly assessed people’s desire to see what their friends are doing in real time, while adding an additional layer of public posts about any given spot.

And yet nearly everyone the Washington Post spoke to is uncertain about the point of Instagram Map. Some said it feels like an inevitable end point for a deeply surveilled, voyeuristic culture.

Nearly every day, Rachel Suleymanov checks in on her friends’ locations. She described the Find My map as a form of social media, even without the input of Instagram. As a 24-year-old Manhattanite whose friends live in Brooklyn, she’s gotten used to seeing hangouts that she can’t make it to on the Find My app. To trade locations with the current 25 friends she tracks, Suleymanov said, “was almost like saying ‘I love you’ in a relationship”. But Instagram Map is a step too far, she said.

“I just think about the amount of people that are following me that I barely know,” Suleymanov said. “I feel like the point of Instagram is that I can post about where I am, should I want to do that. I don’t know if a Snapchat map equivalent is necessary in any way.”

Location sharing goes hand in hand with Gen Z’s quest to be authentic online, Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia, said. But, she argues, many don’t necessarily trust Instagram parent company Meta.

“They’ve been on social media long enough, and have been wronged by social media enough, that they are right to be suspicious of this Instagram feature,” Maddox said. “I think back to earlier this year, when TikTok was going to be banned, right? [Young] people literally joined a Chinese app instead of going to Instagram.”

Gladden uses Find My to check in with friends who don’t use social media as regularly. But she isn’t sure those more private friends would appreciate her snooping: “If I check their location, I can never say anything about it because they might unshare it.”

The fear of an unshared location is real for Find My obsessives, especially because they get a notification if a friend drops them. For Caty DuDevoir, a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, unsharing a location usually results in tension in the friendship.

“When you unshare your location with someone, it feels wrong,” DuDevoir, 23, said. “It feels like a hiccup in a relationship, in a friendship. Are you hiding something? What does this mean for our friendship? That is sort of weird because it’s just not that deep. We’re on a floating rock. If someone wants to stop sharing their location, I don’t think it’s a big deal. And yes, it sometimes feels hurtful.”

While there are safety and social benefits to tracking friends, it gets tricky if you catch them in an ill-advised situation. Surprising hook-ups, hanging out with disliked friends and embarrassing hobbies are all noticeable if someone has your location. “We found out that [a friend] was back with her ex-boyfriend via the Find My Friends thing,” Montse Cuetos, 23, who recently graduated from IE University in Spain, said. “I was scrolling through and I was like, ‘What? You didn’t tell us that was happening.’”

It varies from person to person, but Find My users often find themselves unsure of what to do if they spot a situation unfolding from a map’s-eye view. Confronting a friend about something seen on the map would be a violation of privacy for DuDevoir, even if the location was shared freely. “I just wait for that person to tell me the story that goes behind why they were in a certain place,” she said. “If they don’t feel comfortable, it’s not something that I’m going to push them on.”

That balance becomes a problem, especially as Instagram and Snapchat have made people’s locations so readily available. Besides, isn’t there something magical about naturally running into a friend at the coffee shop? Cuetos thinks so, despite her collection of 21 friends on Find My.

“Having unrestricted access to so much information about your social environment is kind of messed up,” Cuetos said. “It’s like if you had super powers, would you want to read minds? No, it would ruin everybody for you.”