My college experience has largely played out in two areas. As a (good-ish) student, I spend most of my time on campus, where I attend classes, talk with friends, and perform the everyday tasks of life. When I’m not studying, however, I’m 200 miles away in New Hampshire leading wilderness trips to whichever mountain sounds fun for the season and my mood. Some of these trips can be up genuinely dangerous mountains or in dangerous conditions without proper preparation and training. As you can imagine, this makes me a very safety-minded person. I believe the safest trip is the one you don’t send, and any safety procedure missed is a trip canceled. One such procedure is location sharing with on-campus friends or contacts. As a safety-first leader, I feel better taking people into the wonderful wilderness knowing the participants in my care are never far from help should we need it. When it comes to others, safety is a value which reigns supreme.

The Problem

Upon returning to campus, however, I find my values shift. As I transition from group leader to individual student, I find my concern for safety challenged by a concern for privacy. Gradually, I become aware that the proper and necessary safety procedure of something like location sharing becomes a nuisance to my personal sense of autonomy and security. Why is this? I see two primary issues:

The first issue involves information asymmetry. If you share your location with a close friend or relative through a service like Find My iPhone, Life360, or even SnapMaps, they have constant, uninterrupted access to your location. This itself may not be a problem, except you as the tracked user have no information about the people tracking you on the other end. A user might be okay trusting a close friend or family member to use such information responsibly, but what of larger entities like the app’s developers or tech corporations? You may just be one aggregated datapoint of many to a large firm, but it nonetheless yields vital personal information with no mechanism for reassuring you that such data is being used responsibly. Once a location is shared with someone, regardless of duration, you have no ability to determine who is checking your location, when they’ve checked your location, or how often they’ve done so. Without any log of this information, a tracked user gives their close friends and relatives a constant stream of precise information without anything in return. In the worst-case scenario, this information asymmetry exposes individuals to cyberstalking or digital surveillance without any defense mechanism.

The second issue involves an arbitrary binary. The information given to those who have your location is not only cost free (i.e. there’s no identifying signal sent to the user notifying them of your tracking behavior), but constant and precise. Those with your location not only know if you’re in, say, Dunster House, but if you’re in your room, the dining hall, or the lawn. Unless you manually shut off the location–which, again, notifies them and creates an awkward situation–they’re free to check this at any time for any duration. This means that, in their current form, location-sharing services present an ultimatum to the individuals who use them. You either provide a constant stream of information as to your precise whereabouts for somebody to access whenever they please, or you share nothing at all. Framed this way, the location-sharing decision feels less like optimizing for personal safety–the purpose of location sharing in the first place–and more like picking our poison.

Here lies the tension in the tug-of-war between privacy and safety. Today, it feels as though we must choose between our personal privacy or our personal safety. Consider this in the context of my location sharing dilemma. If I choose privacy, I feel comfortable in Cambridge knowing I’ve preserved autonomy over how others use my information and shielded myself from the risk of cyberstalking or other behaviors I’m not comfortable with. However, I risk the safety of everyone under my care when out in the New England wilderness. Conversely, if I choose safety, I keep myself and my participants safe from danger knowing others can find me in the event of an emergency. However, I must live with the uncomfortable feeling of being monitored without my knowledge. It’s quite a dilemma, and a frustrating one at that!

An important caveat to all of this feels necessary. This is not to fearmonger or pit every teenager and young adult against their parents or close friends. As with most crimes or negative situations like it, cyberstalking in this way is an unlikely conflict to arise. If I share my location with someone, it’s likely because I trust them to use the information responsibly. Even so, there’s still value in being able to “trust, but verify” our own privacy and safety. It seems that current services simply don’t offer this ability.

Switches & Dials

A helpful way to frame discussions around location sharing (and the privacy-safety dynamic in general) is with darkness, light, and the switches which control them. We can think of privacy as darkness, in which we maintain a certain level of freedom from scrutiny and retreat from prying eyes. Safety, then, would be like a well-lit room without darkness, in which others can see us and make out our actions, behaviors, and whereabouts. For better or for worse, there is no piece of information left unseen. The services involved in this privacy-safety conflict (Find My iPhone, Life360, etc.) are the mechanisms which control the lights of our metaphorical room. Whether or not we use these services determines how much privacy (darkness) or safety (light) we have in our lives.

Most services today operate like a standard “ON/OFF” switch. A switch is a simple binary, only allowing us to choose complete darkness or complete illumination. Similarly, location-sharing services force us to choose either complete safety or privacy. If we choose safety, we turn on the lights for people to observe our every move and know if something happens. This light can be good, but turning on the lights means that we have nowhere to truly hide. Those allowed to observe the room can see everything, whether we like it or not. Of course, we can free ourselves from prying eyes if we turn off the lights and choose privacy instead. This can bring a different sense of personal comfort and autonomy, but nobody will be able to see us in complete darkness. This is how most privacy-safety products and discussions go. We are either all-in or all-out. These products see the problem like the binary of a light switch, offering only two extremes, each with their own risks.

This world of privacy-safety switches is dangerous and arbitrary. Of course it’s reasonable and often necessary to exchange privacy for safety and vice versa, but it seems ridiculous to be made to choose between the darkness which renders one vulnerable and the light which renders one naked. Perhaps it is more helpful to view the discussion around and development of privacy-safety technologies as a dial instead of a switch. Just as a dial helps us precisely tune the lighting of a room to our liking, it can help precisely tune the information we share to better provide us with automation, information, and autonomy. The current binary is arbitrary, and modifying products and services to fit this framework can be relatively straightforward.

Consider the information asymmetry. With location sharing, the solution doesn’t need to be as intrusive or obnoxious as a notification every time your location is checked, but an easily-accessible “location log” on a service like Life360 or Find My iPhone would provide users a greater sense of autonomy and safety over their privacy. Such solutions may be surprisingly easy to implement. This log could sit in a separate tab on the app, and notify the user if it detects any unusual or frequent activity worth investigating. The log would contain the device’s identity, the date of location checking, and the frequency within a certain time span. 

The Importance

So why does this all matter? We’ve exchanged our privacy more often than we realize, unaware that it was the real price for certain services. Anybody who believes otherwise can peruse the scary-but-real tools of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and remember that the website includes only the basic, free, and legal tools of the trade. Our personal information is collected, harvested, and made readily accessible to entities beyond our line of sight, large and small. Consider just how many children born in the digital age not only share their location with friends, but view it as more of a trend than anything else. We live in a world in which privacy is coming to no longer exist.There are of course benefits to location sharing in this way, symbolizing trust and acting as a helpful safety mechanism. However, such exchanges of personal information, however innocent, should be done with full awareness for their potential consequences. Consider also that 80% of stalking victims are tracked by cyberstalkers, 61% of whom stalk using everyday text and phones. As an issue which affects 40% of undergraduate college students and involves 67% of cyberstalkers who are known to the victim, finding a balance between privacy and safety suddenly seems much more relevant. In such a world, the question is less about whether certain information is accessible and more about how easily it can be accessed. Continuing to perceive the safety-privacy issue and its related products as a switch-like binary ignores the very feasible, often very simple solutions that exist between the two extremes. An individual who questions the current binary exchange will likely find the world abundant with glaring issues and their solutions which would promote safety without jeopardizing privacy. Moreover, the prevalence of such easily-addressable conflicts will begin to raise questions as to why the powerful providers of such services have yet to make the quick fix. It is the responsibility of the privacy-conscious and safety-minded citizen to identify and, where possible, resolve these conflicts. If they don’t, we may very quickly find ourselves wishing for a shadow in a world of light.