Is having the ability to immediately reach a loved one—or at least pinpoint their location—stressing us out?
In recent years, I've relied on Find My Friends as a sort of crystal ball that reassures me everything is as it should be. I use it to make sure my mom, siblings, and husband have made it from point A to point B, and in Brandon's case to find out if he's left the office. A bonus: Letting family members track me has lifted the burden of needing to check in when I get where I'm going.
While these technologies are intended to mitigate risk, at their worst, tracking apps can trigger problematic false alarms when there's a glitch. Take the time I saw my mom seemingly stuck two blocks from her home. When I realized her location hadn't moved in 30 minutes, I worried she had taken a spill while walking the dog. It turns out her battery died while she was strolling through the neighborhood.
Each socially rewarding reason to use tracking tech comes with a privacy-related or anxiety-inducing consequence. The most obvious pitfall: Tracking breeds a lack of trust, especially when it's used to police kids' behavior. Experts agree that trust, privacy, and the opportunity to make mistakes—and grow from them—trump the sense of perceived safety we get from consistent monitoring. “If you're using geo-tracking to find out if your kid is on his way home so you can start making dinner, that's a healthy use,” says Wisniewski. “But if it gets to the point of obsessive monitoring, that's unhealthy surveillance.
“The idea is to interrupt the addictive and unconscious impulse to react to our 'not knowing what to do with ourselves' feeling,” Colier says. “More often than not, tracking and constant communication is a way to avoid the silence of spending time with ourselves.”
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