How Gen Z Turned Location Sharing into a New Kind of Intimacy
In 2010, if you told someone that you would be sharing your real-time location with five friends at all times, they might think you are paranoid. But for Gen Z, who has grown up with phone services like Google’s real-time location sharing and Life360, it is not a matter of paranoia but rather a signal of connection. What began as a parental tether has become a form of love language, able to communicate "I care," "I am safe," or "Yes, I am ignoring you," all without sending a single text.
Gen Z didn’t choose this environment, but they did grow up in it. By the teenage years, always-on tracking was the ambient sound of digital life. By 2025, 36 percent of Gen Z had used location-sharing apps, and 16 percent shared with five or more people. Parents embraced these apps as peace-of-mind tools. Teens accepted them as the price of their freedom. Now (unsurprisingly), 72% of Gen Z women believe their physical well-being benefits from location sharing, and many equate location tracking with safety and normality.
As pandemic lockdowns blurred the boundaries between the physical and digital, location sharing evolved from the original “check-in” feature of Snap Map (launched 2017) into a social act of location-based flexing or real-time vibe-checking. Following a friend's Bitmoji as it moves around the map became its own form of micro-intimacy. The twinkle of dots, essences of paths, felt like a soft “I’m here, I’m with you,” unspoken and ambient.
The emotional rent of always being findable adds up. When your location reads “no response,” your friends get anxious. The map reveals whether you are “ghosting” without really stopping communication. FOMO is perpetuated when there is no invitation, but you can see others gathering without you. Location sharing can turn conversations into petty battlegrounds. Suddenly it’s, “Oh, you had time to walk to Starbucks but not text me back?” or “Weird how you’re at Alex’s place but couldn’t answer my snap.” The map becomes receipts, and receipts become ammo.
The pressure to be connected and “on the grid” can feel limiting. Disabling your location is not a glitch, but a statement. Young people today often see it as concealment, as "drama unfolding," converting personal boundaries into interpersonal tension. These tools, adopted for friendship or amusement or parenting, can be bent into coercive control. Location tracking services like Life360 can allow tracking in an abusive context, without victims necessarily realizing the threat.
There is also, beyond relationships of trust, the data. Location data is also a commodity. Life360 sold location data, including users’ movements, ETAs, driving habits, and even two-day location histories, to approximately a dozen data brokers, such as X-Mode, Cuebiq, SafeGraph, and Arity. These brokers then monetized the information by selling it to advertisers, researchers, or even the insurance and defense industries. This means that the intimacy of being locatable wasn’t just emotionally charged, it was economically leveraged, raising serious privacy concerns and making it reasonable to be wary of turning on that tracking toggle
Still, Gen Z continues to keep the location toggles on. Not because they've been scammed, but because the trade-off feels good enough. In a world where a meet-up is often decided in minutes and one can check on another person’s safety without words, where shared maps keep the night going smoothly, the convenience can be thrilling. The same technology which has the potential to suffocate can also feel like a lifeline. It's a quiet way to say "I'm fine" to people who would worry otherwise, or keep you aware and coordinated without any endless text choreography.
This creates an intimacy that is messy, layered, and unexpectedly durable. Seeing someone’s dot drift toward your neighborhood can feel like anticipation. Watching them head home after a night out can feel like closure. The map, in many ways, becomes a live journal, capturing evenings, habits, and little life notes you would otherwise never know about. For many, this record generates trust, even if it is quietly one-sided.
But like any new intimacy, we are working out the etiquette. How long can you let someone have access to your location? Is it acceptable to cut off access without letting them know? These questions are not only about a new technology but also about boundaries, choice, and what connectedness means when it is automated.
And now with the new Map in Instagram, conveniently placed as one of the top tabs in the direct message inbox, the boundaries are even more blurred – allowing you to share your live location as you scroll, and revealing the content you tagged in recent posts. Being "seen" on the internet is no longer only what you post, but also where you are. For a generation raised on being tracked, "no location" might land heavier than "no response."
Some people are starting to push back. Ghost Mode is becoming less of an emergency stop and more of a normal setting for one's mental space. Temporary sharing, for the night, for the trip, for the date, is emerging as a middle ground between total transparency and total opacity. And there seems to be more and more conversation about data privacy making an appearance in group chats, particularly as more young people realize how easy it is for people (including businesses) to buy, sell, and use location histories.
The irony of location sharing is that it feels incredibly modern and totally human. On one level, it is satellites and software. On another level, it is our oldest instinct: to know where our people are, to feel connected to them. For Gen Z, that tether is digital, but the pull is emotional. The challenge going forward isn't only to avert the harm that location sharing can do. It is to choose how visible we want to be and when it's alright to disappear.
Because maybe the real love language isn't always about being easily findable. Maybe it's trusting that the connection will still be strong even when the dot goes dark.