I've been aggressively sharing my location with anyone who will have it[1] because I think it's important that we grapple with how many people might be aware of our location at this point. Our locations are all shared with many people we will never meet, often in ways that are indirect. The social experience of being able to see a 'location'[2] at any time is a pretty new idea (relatively) and I think the only way we (collectively) are going to form an opinion about how we would like engage or block it is to engage.
What I mean by 'engage' is not to use location sharing (tho I do), but to hypothesize what each one of us thinks is the right approach to location monitoring (embrace, block, etc) and try to implement it. It's the only way we'll develop informed opinions about what should be different and how to improve the system we are building.
[1] If you reply to this with a Gmail address (or message me on twitter or email me: aeturnum@gmail.com) I'll share my location with you. Feel free to share back, or don't! I am not picky.
[2] The idea of a location is super complicated. It involves coordinate systems and maps and abstraction. So I am loath to just talk about it like it's straightforward.
So it's easy to think about all of the things someone could do to you if they have your location: hurt you, delay you, rob you, etc. But it's also very mundanely easy to get the location of a human. I'm sure, if you look outside your window, you can probably find one now.
So the question is how do we draw the lines? When does some random person on the internet knowing my location go from being amusing to being creepy? The only way I've found is to share with people and see how that feels. Because I have the opportunity to learn when someone new can see where I am and reflect on how I feel about that. Or, when I am going somewhere, it reminds me that people can see where I am going. The idea is to increase the opportunities to think about it and, potentially, to find fellow interested people to think about it with.
But, again, my *whole point* is that people can see where all of us are going and we have no idea who. None of us can say exactly how many people are aware of our locations. So the best we can do is reach out and choose to engage (or block) in the location interfaces we have access to and reflect on how those actions impact us and our lives. What do you get from telling Google where you are? What do you get from telling your mom where you are? What do you get from telling a stranger where you are? Are the three related and how?
What I mean by 'engage' is not to use location sharing (tho I do), but to hypothesize what each one of us thinks is the right approach to location monitoring (embrace, block, etc) and try to implement it. It's the only way we'll develop informed opinions about what should be different and how to improve the system we are building.
[1] If you reply to this with a Gmail address (or message me on twitter or email me: aeturnum@gmail.com) I'll share my location with you. Feel free to share back, or don't! I am not picky.
[2] The idea of a location is super complicated. It involves coordinate systems and maps and abstraction. So I am loath to just talk about it like it's straightforward.