Why location sharing is the new trust test for Gen Z — and why it freaks out their parents

LAUREN GILGER: Here’s something I didn’t know as a member of the elderly millennial generation: A whole lot of people younger than me share their locations on their phones — pretty much all the time.

With apps like Find My and Life360, location sharing is becoming a common way that parents track where their kids are, friends track each other, significant others check in on one another.

The generational divide here is clear. Research from CivicScience shows more than 40% of U.S. adults currently share their location with someone. But, for Gen Z it’s 65%. For those older than 55? Just 24%.

So what is it? Is location sharing a sign of trust in a relationship? Is it peace of mind for parents? Or is it a violation of privacy?

I spoke with Brad Snyder for his take. He’s an author and researcher who studies kids for governments and companies like Warner Brothers Discovery, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. He told me it has to do with the digital world that Gen Z has always been steeped in.

BRAD SNYDER: I think it goes to this idea of: What is privacy? And what are we so concerned about? And it's kind of worth thinking about that, because young people already seem to recognize that these social media companies already have so much information about them. They are already sharing so much information about themselves that making it more convenient for people that they like and that they trust just makes sense.

They know that so much information about them is already available — and they had nothing to do with it. So might as well share this with people that I want to have it.

Brad Snyder

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LAUREN GILGER: That's really interesting. It's a very different kind of starting point, I think. This also comes into play a lot, and I know this from being a parent of young kids. For parents, where it's almost like you feel like an irresponsible parent these days if you don't know where your kid is all the time.

Like if you don't ... have an iTag on them or something like that, if you let them ride their bike around the neighborhood. There's a layer of almost Big Brother that feels almost a given now in parenting. Are you seeing that?

SNYDER: I am. And it's interesting because it's artificial. I hear it from my school district clients when they try to impose smartphone controls in schools. Often it's the parents that push back the most on any sort of restrictions of having cellphones or having them open or having them on school grounds.

And we need to think back about exactly what are we afraid of? ... There's a couple of paradoxes in this world. One of the paradox is that we as adults are so upset that our children spend so much time in mediated digital spaces. We want them to be outside playing. We want them to be running around, but yet we're afraid to let them go outside and play.

GILGER: Yeah. That question of, what are we afraid of, is a very interesting one in parenting right now. I mean, I kept thinking about, as I was reading about this, like a time when I was a kid, when your parent would go to the grocery store and you didn't know, you know, exactly where they were when they were coming home or something like that.

Like, they didn't have a cellphone with them the whole time. You just sort of have to talk to them or ask them that question when they got home, whenever that may be. And there wasn't kind of a panic about people's whereabouts. Is something lost, you think, in always knowing or always having the option to know?

SNYDER: I think there's something lost in feeling like you have to access an information. I think it is that we do let fear govern way too much of how we approach parenting. And we're afraid of things that, like, don't exist in any sort of measurable or statistics way. I mean, we know that our neighborhoods are far safer than they've been for 10, 20, 30 years if we look at the overall trends. And that includes things like child abductions, far lower today than at any time that we've been tracking that in years.

Now, one abduction is too many. But we do have to think about, well, what are we balancing and what are we losing? And one of the things that we are losing is our children's ability to experiment and find out for themselves when something isn't working or when it's not meeting their needs.

And one of the things that we know, for example, about how children and teens — I'm talking about now — approach privacy decisions when it comes to digital devices, is that they approach a new environment or an online space, a social network, and they're open on it. And they are inclusive on it — until somebody on it gives them reason not to be.

And then they do put in their own restrictions. They change friend groups, they block people, they change and eliminate posts. Where we as older, as parents, we tend to want to put the blocks in place before they post those things.

GILGER: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting difference, right. And you're kind of tapping into this conversation that's broader right now about independence for young people in general, but for kids in particular, where, you know, there is a big loss of that. And that seems to be affecting their development, their ... ability to fail, to get hurt.

SNYDER: Right. Well, and this is something that we've known for a really long time in the child-development world that kids need. They need opportunities to try things and fail and try again until they get it right. It turns out this is one of the greatest ways that we can learn things and how we, as all humans, really want to learn. But we've decreased the opportunities for them to do this in the real world.

And then we turn around and go, well, why do they spend so much time in these video games, for example? Well, because in those video games, they are allowed to try something and fail and try again.

GILGER: Let me ask you about, I guess, kind of the underlying tension with this idea of location sharing, Brad. I wonder if you're talking about independence in kids or privacy concerns for people in general who are location sharing, is this about something more profound or maybe the loss of something more profound?

Is it about sort of the loss of trust in maybe our partners, maybe our family, maybe our kids, or maybe just the loss of our trust in our communities, our society?

SNYDER: Well, I can tell you about a study that's actually a little bit over a decade old now. And it was actually conducted by or in cooperation with the American Bar Association, because they were seeing again, for the first time, they were seeing all this discovery of digital records. "I need to see all of your email exchanges, and I need to see them from your fake email accounts, and I need to see them from .—"

And what the researchers who did this work were concluding, and what they saw in the children of these families that were going through divorce, is that hiding things in a digital space is bad. And these children were concluding that the answer is to be completely transparent in the digital world. You don't, like, hide your email. You let other people see it. And in fact, for a little while it was being written about that a rite of passage of young romantic relationships was when they exchanged passwords for their email accounts.

GILGER: I wonder what your advice would be to parents, maybe, or maybe even to young people, as they're considering this idea of location sharing. And is it a moot point? Is it something, you know, they should weigh together?

SNYDER: Well, fortunately, it all goes back to kind of like social-emotional intelligence. What we can recognize in a situation to know whether or not this situation is dangerous, whether or not the people around us have our interests at heart, what to do when we feel pressure or anxious or nervous. So this kind of intelligence applies to every situation. But it also helps us recognize when we are being asked in a digital space for information that we shouldn't be being asked or being asked by somebody that doesn't need it and shouldn't be asking for it. Or knowing how to block somebody when they are misusing personal information that I gave them.

So it kind of all goes back to more basic relationship skills and self-regulatory skills.