We saw recently that many Gen Z people have a much more relaxed attitude to location privacy than the rest of us, happily sharing their location 24/7 with entire groups of friends.
But for those of us who prefer a more restrained approach to sharing our location, I’d like to see one basic change, and a couple of intelligent features added to the Find My app …
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I found the report quite eye-opening. One comment by a 19yo seemed to sum up the feeling of ongoing location-sharing being a really obvious thing to do, and no big deal.
“I don’t find people having my location to be invasive at all. I think that’s just a natural part of life,” said Rhiannon Cogley, 19. “I would tell people where I am anyways. That just saves a text, you know?”
It did make me wonder why my own attitude to location privacy is different. It’s not like I would have any practical concerns about friends being able to see where I am – it would simply feel like a very odd thing to do. Rational or not, it’s not something I plan to change.
But the piece also highlighted one inflexibility in the Find My app: your only options are to share for one hour, until midnight, or indefinitely. Checking that everyone in a group of friends got home safely after a late night out is one situation where the midnight cutoff might be problematic, and 9to5Mac reader Zabby pointed to another situation I’ve been in myself.
I think it would be useful to be able to set a day and time for the feature to end. Especially when on holiday with a group of friends and always sharing so we find each other.
I think this scenario could be addressed in a couple of ways …
A date and time picker
For the late night, being able to specify something like 6am rather than midnight would allow us to see that everyone got home without continuing to track them the next day.
Similarly with group holiday usage, we want everyone in the group to be able to track each other until the end of the stay, but not beyond. Currently we have to select the Indefinitely option and then remember to cancel it. Being able to use a date-picker to specify the end of the trip would be ideal here.
But I’d like to throw in a a couple of intelligent refinements here.
‘Until I get home’
A better solution to the night out scenario would be to allow us to opt to share our location “Until I get home.” In that case, nobody would even have to think about timings – just set and forget when you arrive at the meetup location.
Once you do arrive home, the app should cease sharing your live location, but still allow the group to see that you made it home earlier.
For both night out and holiday scenarios, we shouldn’t need to laboriously select each of the people we want to share with. Instead, there should be a ‘Share with the contacts here.’ It should then use Bluetooth to see which of your contacts are with you at the time, and add each of them to the sharing group.
It of course wouldn’t share with anyone not stored in your contacts, and it should show the members of the group it has auto-included.
Are these improvements you’d like to see Apple make to the Find My app? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
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