Latest news with #locationtracking
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
This Latest Teen Trend Has Experts Feeling Very Uneasy, And It Makes Sense Why
Trends change, technology advances, yet teenagers always seem to stay the same. They find new ways to maintain social relevance — often by doing things older generations don't understand. (Don't believe me? Just try to guess what any of their slang terms mean.) One of the latest teen trends is something that might raise a few eyebrows among parents, due to safety and privacy concerns: location tracking. Although teens crave independence from their parents, they are voluntarily sharing their real-time whereabouts with their friends. Popular phone tracking app Life360 recently found that Gen Z is 70% more likely than any other age group to share their location with friends. And 94% of Gen Z surveyed said their lives benefit from location sharing. In May 2025, Snapchat announced that its location-sharing Snap Map has more than 400 million monthly active users, per TechCrunch. This influences other social media platforms, as Instagram is reportedly working on a similar Friend Map to allow users to see their friends' locations. Many adults, including Leigh McInnis, the executive director of Newport Healthcare, may feel wary about this trend; however, McInnis keeps an open mind. 'While my immediate instinct is related to the protection of privacy and boundaries,' she told HuffPost, 'I realize that this impulse is likely more related to my generational identity and discomfort with technology and tracking than the social needs and preferences of today's teens and young adults.' McInnis added, 'I think that it is important to explore the function of a behavior before judging it or intervening in it.' Not sure what to think about it — or how to ensure your teen uses an app like this safely? Keep reading for expert-backed opinions to help you understand why your teens might like sharing their location, as well as tips on setting boundaries and red flags to look for. Location Sharing Isn't Necessarily New 'Many of the teens I work with — including my own daughter — share their location with their friends,' said Dr. Cameron Caswell, adolescent psychologist, host of Parenting Teens with Dr. Cam podcast, and parent of a teen. 'It's a little about safety, but mostly 'because it's just fun to see what each other is doing.'' Back in the olden days (circa 2006), teens would update their Myspace status to let you know what they were up to. Later, they 'checked in' to places on Foursquare and Facebook, shared real-time updates on Snapchat and Instagram stories, and tweeted every detail of their lives. Now, they use Snapchat's Snap Map, Life360, or Apple's location sharing to share with their friends everywhere they are in real time. 'This isn't new,' Caswell said. 'In a world where nearly everything is shared, this doesn't feel invasive to teens — it feels normal. It's just another way they stay looped into each other's lives.' Teens also use apps like this to track their parents, according to Caswell, whose own daughter will text her if she sees her mom is at Ulta and ask for lip gloss. 'For many teens, location sharing is about connection and a sense of safety,' Caswell explained. 'It's their way of saying, 'You're in my circle' and 'I've got your back.'' Understanding The Risks Even though sharing your location with friends might be popular, it doesn't come without consequences. Cheryl Groskopf, an anxiety, trauma, and attachment therapist based in Los Angeles, sees teens sharing their locations as a way 'to manage anxiety, track social dynamics and feel less alone.' 'There's comfort in knowing where your people are, especially in a world where teens constantly feel like they could get left out, replaced, or excluded,' she said. 'But that comfort is fragile — it relies on constant access (which leaves their nervous system hypervigilant to feeling 'left out').' 'If you're checking someone's location because you don't trust what they're telling you — or because they don't trust you — then it's already crossed into a control dynamic,' Groskopf said. In her practice, she's seen teens 'spiral' when they spot their friend at a party they weren't invited to, or 'because someone didn't respond fast enough, but 'was clearly at home.'' She explained, 'It becomes a setup for overthinking, panic, and social surveillance.' 'Teens shouldn't use location sharing when it's being used to avoid rejection, manage someone else's anxiety, or prove loyalty,' she added. McInnis said, 'Teens sharing their location and having their friends track them could harm their mental health.' Constantly seeing (and comparing) your friends' social activities 'can lead to feelings of inadequacy,' she added. Caswell agreed. 'Location sharing can intensify FOMO (fear of missing out) and social exclusion,' she said. 'Seeing a group of friends hanging out without them — even unintentionally — can make them feel lonelier and more left out.' In addition to these emotional risks, there are physical risks, too. Like a teen's location data being available to someone who might wish them harm. 'In the wrong hands, it can make [teens] more vulnerable to stalking, harassment or even predatory behavior, especially if they are in controlling relationships,' Caswell said. There's A Gender Gap Teen girls may be more likely to use location sharing as a way to feel safer. According to the Life360 survey, 70% of Gen Z women believe their physical well-being benefits from location sharing. In the field, our experts also found that females were more likely to do this. Caswell said that 'mostly girls' will openly share their location with friends, 'both for fun and because it makes them feel safer knowing someone always knows where they are.' However, this sense of safety is a double-edged sword, as it can 'increase the risk of stalking, harassment, or even sexual violence,' Caswell said. 'Especially when their location is shared with the wrong person, which is often someone they know and trust.' Groskopf warns of the dangers girls and femme teens may experience when their use of location-sharing is weaponized against them. 'It can easily turn into emotional surveillance disguised as closeness,' she explained. (For example, a friend or partner telling them, 'If you trust me, you'll let me see where you are.') 'I see these kinds of patterns play out in high-control dynamics — friends or partners checking locations not to stay safe, but to manage anxiety, jealousy, or power,' Groskopf said. 'And girls are way more likely to internalize that and comply, even when it feels off. They're more likely to be conditioned to avoid conflict, manage other people's emotions, and keep the peace — even if that means overriding their own boundaries.' That's why teaching your kids how to set boundaries, in real life and online, is important. Setting Boundaries Teaching your teen how to handle location-sharing in a safe way starts with conversations around consent and the ability to say no. When asked if there is a safe way for teens to share their locations, Groskopf said, 'Only if there's real consent, boundaries, and the freedom to opt out without punishment.' In this case, the punishment could be feeling guilt-tripped or rejected by a friend. 'That means not just technically having the option to stop sharing, but knowing you won't be guilted, shut out, or shamed if you do,' Groskopf continued. 'A parent saying, 'I want to know where you are in case of emergency' is one thing. A friend saying, 'Why'd you turn off your location?' with passive-aggressive silence afterward is something else entirely.' She added, 'Safe tracking only works when it's not being weaponized to regulate someone else's fear, jealousy, or insecurity.' How To Talk To Your Teen About Location Sharing Start the conversation with curiosity, not criticism, Caswell said. 'Instead of banning [location sharing], I recommend walking through privacy settings together and having calm conversations about why they're sharing in the first place,' she said. 'Is it for safety? To feel connected to their bestie? Because they feel pressured to? Helping teens understand why they are doing it makes location sharing a lot safer and more intentional.' From there, encourage your teen to only share their location with 'a small, trusted circle of close friends or family,' and check in on this list frequently. 'One mom I worked with told me her daughter was shocked to find an ex-boyfriend still had access to her location,' Caswell said. 'Of course, that explained why he kept 'randomly' showing up wherever she was. Instead of freaking out, the mom used it as an opportunity to talk with her daughter about how to use tech more safely moving forward.' It's always a good idea to talk with your teens about how to stay safe online and set boundaries around privacy with their friends. But keep in mind, this starts at home. 'Let your teen say no to you sometimes,' Caswell suggested. 'Practicing boundaries with someone safe gives them the confidence to do it with someone who isn't,' she added. 'That's how they build real-world safety skills — not just digital ones.' This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- The Guardian
Tracking apps might make us feel safe, but blurring the line between care and control can be dangerous
Who knows where you are right now? Your friends, your boss? Maybe your parents? How about your partner? According to recent research by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, 'nearly 1 in 5 young people believe it's OK to track their partner whenever they want'. As a long-term and stubbornly-vocal privacy advocate, I find this alarming. It's hard to imagine a bigger red flag than someone wanting to keep tabs on my daily movements. It's not that I'm doing anything remotely secretive: my days are most often spent working from home, punctuated by trips to the bakery – scandalous! But it's not about whether I have anything to hide from my partner. Everyone ought to have the right to keep things to themselves, and choose when they do or don't share. After reading this study I became troubled by a niggling feeling that perhaps I'm standing alone in the corner of the party while all my friends share their locations with one another. So I conducted a highly unscientific survey of people in my life. As it turns out, aside from a small handful who share my resistance, lots of people are indeed keeping digital tabs on one another. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Many constantly share their location with their partner, or use apps like Life360 or Find My Friends. Some groups of friends all do it together, and talk of it as a kind of digital closeness where physical distance and the busyness of life keeps them apart (I assure myself that I'm not invited to the tracking party for obvious reasons). Others use apps to keep familial watch over older relatives – especially when their health may be in decline. Obviously this is anecdotal, but it seems people are using all kinds of digital monitoring for all kinds of reasons, not all of them nefarious. Some research suggests the notion of 'careful surveillance' can form intimacy in ways that complicates typical ideas of privacy. It's hard to ignore the gendered nature of all this. The eSafety Commissioner's research specifically highlights that men are significantly more likely to consider intimate partner monitoring as reasonable and a 'sign of care'. Conversely, women tell me they digitally track one another as a safety mechanism while walking home at night, travelling alone or out on dates – specifically as a response to the terrifying state of men's violence against women. Likewise, research shows how some women perceive their phone as a key tool to mitigate safety risk. Perhaps one of the most disturbing notions is that acceptance of digital monitoring is often presented as a way to create – rather than undermine – a sense of trust. When government officials or tech industry bigwigs proclaim that you should be OK with being spied on if you're not doing anything wrong, they're asking (well, demanding) that we trust them. But it's not about trust, it's about control and disciplining behaviour. 'Nothing to hide; nothing to fear' is a frustratingly persistent fallacy, one in which we ought to be critical of when its underlying (lack of) logic creeps into how we think about interacting with one another. When it comes to interpersonal surveillance, blurring the boundary between care and control can be dangerous. The eSafety Commissioner is right to raise concerns that many of these behaviours are characteristic of tech-based coercive control, and to call out that use of digital spying tools by parents on their children has 'anaesthetised young people to the whole idea of being monitored', teaching them that surveillance is a form of love. Just as normalising state and corporate surveillance can lead to further erosion of rights and freedoms over time, normalising interpersonal surveillance seems to be changing the landscape of what's considered to be an expression of love – and not necessarily for the better. Many parents opt to use digital monitoring apps for fear for their children's safety. But this troubled association between surveillance and safety doesn't just come from protective parents: it's a long-held position of police, intelligence agencies and even politicians. It can be found in the repeated attempts to undermine end-to-end encryption, despite secure communications being essential to many people's online safety. It's in the moves to put facial recognition into CCTV cameras throughout Melbourne, despite it being well documented that such technologies demonstrate racial bias and exacerbate harms against people of colour. It's in assuring students that university wifi tracking and campus cameras are for safety, then weaponising it against them for protesting. We ought to be very critical of claims that equate surveillance with safety. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion As is often the case with issues of privacy, the boundaries between what might be OK and what feels intrusive generally comes back to a few key principles. This includes meaningful consent (do you know when, how and why it's being used, and do you have the ability to say no without repercussions?) and purpose limitation (is it for specific situations? Or is it all the time and for any reason?). As always, questions of who holds power and agency are crucial. Maybe these are markers of changing notions of love and care in a time of rampant surveillance, but, as always, we ought to be careful about what we usher in as the new normal. For me, I'll be holding on to a more offline kind of love. Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer. They are the program lead at Digital Rights Watch
ABC News
14-05-2025
- ABC News
Location-sharing apps linked to increased risk of digital coercive control, eSafety Commission research finds
Nearly one in five young adults believe tracking a partner's location is to be expected in a relationship, new research has found. The eSafety Commission study has linked location-sharing apps with an increased risk of coercive control. More than 13 per cent of the 2,000 adults surveyed said it was reasonable for a partner to monitor them using location-sharing apps like Life360 and Find My iPhone. "It isn't an exaggeration to say preventing tech-based coercive control, and the attitudes that it condones can save lives," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. "Young people have become so accustomed to certain levels of online tracking by family and friends … that it no longer raises red flags in a relationship." Tech-based coercive control is defined as a behaviour pattern that uses digital technology to control, manipulate and create fear in a current or former relationship. About a quarter of adults surveyed agreed it was necessary to have a partner's passwords and codes for their personal devices. A similar study published by Griffith University earlier this year found location-sharing apps had become "normalised" as a way for parents to monitor their children. Location-sharing apps like Life360 are marketed to "protect your family with easy-to-use location tracking". Over the last three years, Griffith University PhD candidate María Atiénzar Prieto has studied perceptions of digital coercive control. Her survey of more than 1,000 young people said the acceptance of location sharing "starts at home". "We found parents increasingly used tracking apps to monitor children and provide safety," she said. The 2023 murder of Lilie James put tech-facilitated control in the headlines, when it was revealed last March that her killer had tracked her location through Snapmaps. The court heard her killer's behaviour was normalised as "coming from a place of kindness and love". Ms Atiénzar Prieto found the technology was "the perfect tool for perpetrators of domestic violence". "Participants in my study discussed how the first time they were monitored was in an environment of care and love and that was then being transferred to other relationships," Ms Atiénzar Prieto said. She said parents needed to explain that they're using these apps for safety, but that there were risks in using it outside the family. According to the eSafety commission, the average Australian household has about 40 inter-connected devices. The eSafety Commission wants more education for young people to understand digital coercion and consent, and for norms around digital privacy respect in relationships be reshaped. "There needs to be conversations about setting digital boundaries and what consent looks like" Ms Inman Grant said. "We're not saying a couple in a relationship or family members shouldn't share their location online but it's the expectation to track a romantic partner's movements, which is problematic — even dangerous". Ms Inman Grant is calling on companies to adopt more safety by design features and mindful engineering of apps to prevent misuse. "We had one situation where a young woman was being surveilled through her electronic cat-feeder" she said. "It was used by her former partner to track her movements in the house and to see who she was with. "The thing that's so insidious about coercive control is that a very determined predator can always exploit the loopholes." In serious cases, victim-survivors have had to begin new digital identities and accounts to stay safe. Ashton Wood is the founder and chief executive DV Safe Phone, which provides free phones to victim-survivors as part of their safety and escape plan. "Unfortunately, the only way of really knowing that you're not being tracked or monitored as a domestic violence victim is to have a device that the partner doesn't know about at all, so it doesn't even exist, as far as they're concerned," he said. "As technology gets better, perpetrators are always finding ways to weaponise it, and then the manufacturers and software providers find ways to lock it down, and then the perpetrators find a way around that." DV Safe Phone has provided more than 12,000 free phones in the past five years and asks people to donate their old phones to help. The charity has been handing the fully reset phones out to police stations, safe houses, hospitals and domestic violence agencies to distribute. "Once they're out of danger, we generally recommend destroying the old phone, unless they need it for evidence, and then keep [the new] phone because that hasn't been compromised."
Associated Press
08-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
LocaChange Releases Comprehensive Life360 Data Analysis: Insights into User Growth, Revenue Trends, and Privacy Concerns
LocaChange reveals key Life360 user, revenue, and privacy trends in its 2025 data analysis, helping families understand app benefits and risks. 'Understanding how location platforms manage user data is no longer optional—it's essential. This research helps bridge the gap between technological utility and responsible data governance.'— said Teddy, lead analyst at LocaChange. NEW YORK CITY, NY, CHINA, May 8, 2025 / / -- In response to the rising concerns over digital safety and real-time location tracking, virtual location solution provider LocaChange has released an in-depth report analyzing the current state of Life360 —one of the world's most popular family tracking apps. The report, titled 'Life360 Data Analysis 2025: User Statistics, Revenue Insights, and Privacy Concerns' offers a comprehensive look at the app's user demographics, global adoption trends, revenue patterns, and evolving public perception. As a professional institution focused on virtual location technologies and digital privacy, LocaChange initiated this 2025 research project to systematically analyze Life360's key data indicators. The goal was to better understand user behavior, data monetization practices, and the platform's evolving privacy policies. This initiative was driven by the growing public scrutiny over how location data is collected, shared, and potentially exploited. LocaChange's report serves not only as a technical breakdown but also as an authoritative resource to guide industry discussions on ethical data usage. Key Findings from the Report Include: Continued Popularity in 2025: Life360 remains widely used worldwide, with Google Trends showing a noticeable spike in early 2023 due to severe weather emergencies in California. Its 2025 popularity level is higher than the average in 2024, reflecting consistent global demand for family safety solutions. Massive User Base Growth (2020–2024): Life360's monthly active users (MAUs) have grown steadily year over year. As of 2024, tens of millions of users globally rely on its features for daily safety and location sharing. Core User Demographics: The dominant user groups fall within the 25–44 age range, representing young parents and working professionals. Female users make up a larger share of the user base—often managing family settings—while younger males engage more with driving safety features. U.S.-Dominant Market Presence: 60% of Life360's users are based in the United States, with emerging traction in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Mexico. The report notes that localization and improved privacy protections will be critical for expanding into additional global markets. Strong Revenue Growth (2018–2024): Life360's annual revenue jumped from $32 million in 2018 to $371 million in 2024—a more than 10x increase. The growth is primarily fueled by its subscription model (Gold and Platinum plans), along with acquisitions like Tile and B2B partnerships with insurance firms. Shifting Monetization Strategy: In response to 2021 criticism for selling users' precise location data—including that of minors—Life360 halted such practices. Since then, it has shifted toward privacy-respecting features like crash detection, AI-based driving insights, and subscription-focused growth. Ongoing Privacy Debate: While new privacy features such as 'Ghost Mode' have been introduced, concerns remain—particularly among teenagers and digital rights advocates. Nonetheless, Life360 continues to rank as one of the most trusted family safety apps due to its transparency and evolving safeguards. The full report is available here: Life360 Data Analysis by LocaChange About LocaChange: Founded in May 2023, LocaChange is a fast-growing technology company specializing in the global development and promotion of consumer utility software. With an integrated approach across R&D, operations, and marketing, LocaChange delivers smart, user-centric tools that help individuals manage their digital presence and location privacy. By leveraging cutting-edge data research and real-world use case analysis, LocaChange aims to empower users with greater control, safety, and flexibility in an increasingly connected world. The company's official website offers detailed product positioning, feature overviews, and transparent pricing, making advanced location solutions more accessible to everyday consumers. Visit LocaChange here: Mary LocaChange Technology Co., Ltd. email us here Visit us on social media: Facebook YouTube X Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
