// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Brian Mackey: From Illinois Public Media, this is The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. As you know, Illinois lawmakers were working until the early morning hours today, finalizing the state budget, taking up other matters, not taking up some important matters like the Chicago Bears legislation. We're going to talk more about that a little later in the hour today, and then tomorrow we're planning to dedicate the full show to this topic, speaking with all four of the top legislative leaders, Democratic and Republican, about what happened.

But for now, we're going to turn to something completely different. Location sharing apps are becoming more and more popular. Programs such as Life360, Google Maps, and Apple's Find My Friends allow people to share their location with friends, family, maybe even coworkers. We on the show actually used this feature last year when producer Jose and I took a hot air balloon ride over Vermillion County. You never know where a balloon is going to land. We wanted to make it easy to find us. You can find a similar feature on social media apps as well, such as Snapchat and Instagram, which features a world map showing the location of anyone that opts in the program.

It's obvious these apps have become quite popular, but until recently, they've not been studied all that much. That prompted a researcher from the University of Illinois to investigate why people find these applications so useful, and what that means for our relationships with family, friends, and everyone in between. Joining us now to talk more about this is Brian Ogolsky, professor and director of graduate programs in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the UI College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Always good to talk with a fellow Brian. Welcome to The 21st Show.

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Brian Ogolsky: Pleasure to be here, Brian.

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Brian Mackey: Listeners, you can join us today: 800-222-9455. How do you feel about the rise of location sharing apps? Do you share your location with family, maybe with friends? Let us know. 800-222-9455 is the number. 800-222-9455.

All right, Brian, maybe we can just start by talking about your experience with location sharing apps.

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, happy to share. It's kind of funny. This is one of those research projects where everybody kind of has a little bit of experience these days. And for me, it was really when I had children that we started location sharing. So my kids and I, and my partner and I, we share location with each other. But that was about the start and the finish of it. And it wasn't until I got into my classroom, where we study romantic relationships, that the college students got really excited about this and sort of told me, "What do you mean you only share with just a couple of people?" And many of them shared their location with 10, 20, 30 people. And so they asked me, you know, "Is this normal?" And I said, "Well, you know what, we don't have very much data on this, so we probably ought to do a study" — and that's exactly what we did.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, well, tell me about it. So how did you go about conducting a study on this topic that, as you say, many, many people are sort of casually, personally familiar with — but how do you study it?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, so what we did is we went to a panel data firm and collected data from just over 200 people. We simply asked them to — they were only able to take part in the study as long as they had a smartphone and they shared with at least one person, so they had some experience with it. And we really, because there's not a lot of information on it, we really just wanted to know what they had to say about it. So we asked them very simple open-ended questions: Who do you share your location with? How many people? Why do you share your location? And then we had some more detailed questions about the nature — you know, how long they shared, do they stop, do they start — those kinds of things. But the nature of the first study here that we did was really just to understand: What are the reasons that people are using? Do these reasons vary as a function of who they're sharing with — if it's their partner, or as you said in the opening, coworkers, or friends, or those kinds of things? And so that's how we got started.

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Brian Mackey: Tell me about the sample. Is it across generations, across economic class? How did you find the people?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, so we used a panel data service that allowed us to get — I won't say a completely representative sample, but we had a decent amount of diversity in terms of age and generation. It ranged in age from 18 to about 59, 60 — I think that was the upper limit there. And the average age was right around 33, but there was a decent standard deviation, so we know we had lots of variability around there. So we have people with kids, without kids, people who may still consider themselves kids. And a decent range there across SES — so we had range in income, in education, those kinds of things. But it wasn't a tremendously large sample, 200 people. But because we had such rich narrative data, we figured that was an appropriate size to be able to dig in and kind of get at the core of these issues.

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Brian Mackey: SES, I'm guessing, is socioeconomic status. So, OK, with that understood, what are some of the top-line findings? What jumped out to you about how people are using these applications?

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Brian Ogolsky: Absolutely. So we kind of found four big processes. The first one will probably surprise nobody, and that's this idea of safety — that people share their location to feel safer, or to help them feel like they can provide help to other people. So, you know, you talked in the opening about a hot air balloon. If you ended up in some kind of emergency, hopefully these location sharing apps can help you be found if you're lost on a hike or some such thing. But what's kind of interesting when we really dig into this idea of safety is it's really a perception of safety, right? Because we don't know if we can actually make people safer, we don't know if we can actually find them. So we also sort of think of this as peace of mind. It gives people peace of mind that in theory they will be safer if they share their location with somebody else, and it gives us, as the recipients, peace of mind that we know where perhaps our loved ones or our friends are in real time.

In addition, we found a group of reasons that we call practicality. So this is the idea that we can plan events, we can travel, we can provide convenience — planning around meals, planning around any kinds of events and activities you might do as a family. That was all wrapped up in what we call practicality. So scheduling kinds of things. And this also incorporated things like long-distance relationships when people are separated, or for work trips or professional trips, those kinds of things.

Our third category was about relationship processes — so helping build trust, and/or mitigating mistrust. So some people talked about, you know, knowing where their partner is in real time so that they're not doing anything nefarious. That was the minority of people who talked about that, but much more it was just, you know, to help build trust in relationships. Part of a contemporary relationship is knowing where your partner is in real time, which is kind of an interesting commentary.

And the last one was just simply what we called casual — so just kind of knowing where people are. People would say things like, "I just do it for fun, I just kind of want to know where my friends are in real time," but no real deeper meaning. So those are kind of the four big groupings of things that we found.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, OK. So the safety, practicality, relationships, and then just for fun. We're going to break those down in a moment. But before we do, talk about the number of people — what's average? What are some of the interesting outliers?

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Brian Ogolsky: In terms of the number of people —

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Brian Mackey: Sorry, yeah, in terms of the number of people someone might be sharing their location with. I didn't phrase that very felicitously.

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Brian Ogolsky: No worries. On average, people reported sharing with between 3 and 4 people — so one might think about that as like your most immediate, like if you have a group of roommates or a family that you're sharing with. That was kind of the average, but the standard deviation there — the variability — was quite large. And we did have somebody who reported sharing with over 80 people. What that means in real time, I have no idea, because I can't imagine myself sharing with — or having location information for — over 80 people. But it seems, particularly among younger people, that it's much more normative to share with lots of people, and people who we might consider acquaintances, or not our immediate deepest friends or family members.

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Brian Mackey: Interesting, yeah. Well, I guess it's below the — what is it — the Dunbar number, which is what, 150 — this idea that you can only really have 150 true relationships. But it seems like a lot to me too, but then I'm, you know, old.

All right, if you're just joining us, this is The 21st Show. We're talking about location sharing apps and how they relate to establishing relationships with other people, be they family or friends or maybe some casual acquaintances from the dorm. We're talking about this with Brian Ogolsky, who's a professor and director of graduate programs in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at [the UI's] College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. If you want to join us today: 800-222-9455. With whom are you sharing your location? How do you feel about that? Would you consider sharing with friends if you only share with family for safety? Do you want people to know where you are at all times — or at least have the option of that? How do you feel about that? Let us know: 800-222-9455.

All right, let's talk about some of these four areas you mentioned — safety, practicality, relationships and sort of romantic relationships, I guess, and then just for fun. And we'll start with safety. What does that actually look like, how does that actually work in practice?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, so a couple of things that stood out when we thought about safety — the way people were talking about it — most commonly, we had this kind of notion that there are particularly what I'll call vulnerable populations that we care more about. And so when we're thinking about who are we asking for their location, or who are we requiring to share location with us, it tended to be young people and older people. So among parents, for example, in some cases they would report a requirement that their children share their location — perhaps they're out driving, new drivers. So any time a new milestone for young people came about, people would talk about the sort of safety involved in that.

And on the flip side — again, these are people in their 30s and 40s on average — so many of them are kind of sandwiched between taking care of children and perhaps also taking care of parents. So frequently we'd have people talk about a father or a mother who maybe has some kind of health condition or is in need of care, and they want to make sure that they know where that person is in real time if anything should happen. So that tended to be the most frequently [cited] idea in that safety domain: I can provide help, or I can get help, for people who are either younger or older.

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Brian Mackey: One of the findings of the study I found surprising was that mothers are more keen on this than fathers. I guess I wouldn't necessarily have expected there was a difference there. What does that say to you?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, that's a really good question, and we're not entirely sure. At some level, we sort of thought perhaps people would share with their parents in equal numbers, so to speak. But we're not entirely sure why that is. It could be that mothers on average are providing more caregiving than fathers are, but we really don't have the data in this particular study to understand why that might be. So there could be trust issues there, there could be just reporting issues there. But we really don't have the information to know why people are reporting sharing with mothers more than fathers.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. And this is something that will come up when we get to relationships as well. But how do you think about the line between safety and surveillance? We've spoken with Lenore [Skenazy] on the show — she's the free-range kids advocate, written books on that, runs an organization aimed at saying, you know, we are too helicoptery as parents of this generation. How do you think about that line?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, that was one of the things we thought was going to come up a lot more. We expected there would be both a positive and a negative aspect to what people were reporting — that people would be talking about partners surveilling each other, perhaps kids feeling surveilled by their parents. And interestingly, we did not have a lot of that. But we also, when we think about these kinds of samples, we're often not getting what we sort of consider help-seeking samples. We may not have people here who are in troubled relationships, or relationships where there might be intimate partner violence going on, stalking behaviors. So we're not entirely sure if some of it is just based on the sample we got.

But in contemporary relationships, the ability to watch over somebody's location in real time does absolutely have dangerous potential outcomes. And so one of our other lines of research in the lab — with my colleague Jennifer [Hartesty], also in the College of [ACES] — is in this domain of intimate partner violence, and we know a lot of money has been poured in from the federal government through the Department of Justice to understanding internet-related stalking and internet-related intimate partner violence behaviors. So it is really important that we keep thinking about the negative side of this. In addition to the potential safety benefits, we really need to be thinking about what does it mean to feel safe, and what are the potential downsides to giving up our data, sharing our location in real time, violating norms of privacy that may have, in past decades, been a lot more difficult to violate. So there's a lot there.

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Brian Mackey: All right, and we will unpack some of that after a break. We are talking with Brian Ogolsky, who is at the University of Illinois, a specialist in human development and family studies there. And this is The 21st Show. We'll be right back.

It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. We are talking about location sharing apps. These are most commonly on our smartphones. They go by names like Life360 or Find My on Apple devices. This is also built into other services and social media sites like Google Maps, Snapchat and Instagram. New research from the University of Illinois shows they can shape how we shape our relationships with others and can be seen as a new form of communication in and of itself. We're talking about this with Brian Ogolsky, professor and director of graduate programs in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at [the UI's] College of [ACES] — Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. You can join us today at 800-222-9455.

All right, before the break, we were talking about these four reasons that your study found that people look at this. The first one was safety. The next one is practicality. I'm curious about this — how do people say that it actually is a practical use case for them?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, this to me is actually the most interesting contribution to relationship science, and something I've been thinking a lot about after this study. So the primary things people talk about is essentially being able to understand when things are happening by kind of passively looking at somebody else's location sharing. So think about it as: I'm going to make dinner — rather than texting or calling one's partner or one's child to say, "When are you going to be home?" — instead, they just open up Find My, look at where they are on the road, estimate when they'll be home, and sort of do it passively. And there was a lot of discussion about these kinds of passive planning activities where there actually is no direct communication between the two people, but rather they just look at where somebody is and make decisions unilaterally about what may or may not happen around those kinds of things.

And so at some level, this is at odds with a lot of what we think about with the importance of relational communication — you know, openly talking with one another, texting, planning. We think back to decades ago where if we wanted to get together with somebody, we would have our corded telephone, we would wait for that person to call, we would say we're going to be at this place at this time, and cross our fingers and hope for the best. At this point, on one hand, it gives us the ability to be a little more whimsical in our planning. We can say, "Hey, I see that you're near me right now. Let's meet up for coffee," or, you know, "I'm going to meet you at this parking lot" — and you hope that your location sharing app and your phone was charged, all those kinds of things. On the other hand, it strips away the more overt planning, the more careful planning, and some of the conversation about, "Do you want to have dinner at this time or that time?" There's just a lot more passivity in the planning activities, which is really interesting, and perhaps kind of where we're headed in terms of contemporary communication.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, I was thinking about the evolution of this — looking at your study. In the Victorian era, we had calling cards, right? You'd go and literally knock on someone's door and wait in the parlor and give your card to their butler. And then we had the phone and you could call. Now, even, I feel like with certain people it might be rude to just call and not text first to see if they're available for a phone call. This takes it to a whole new level, and maybe every generation felt that the next generation was a little bizarre in their habits. But how do you think about that?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. And generational differences — what's interesting about them — when I think about people who are in their teens and twenties who grew up with phone in hand, pretty much, this has become a part of their digital culture. They expect to know where people are, they expect responses in real time and don't really know it any differently. And this is not a judgment on what that means, but rather there are just new norms and scripts about how long it should take to know what somebody's plans are, how long it should take to respond to a text message, or how long it should take to get to a particular place where you're meeting up. And I think that's kind of where we're at with the younger generation who grew up in this way, and it's something that people who are in older generations kind of have to adjust to when planning with the younger generation.

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Brian Mackey: Oh, I feel like Grandpa Simpson. Let's talk about romantic relationships. Is enabling location sharing like a milestone now — like giving your partner a key to your apartment sort of thing?

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, that's kind of interesting. In many ways, I actually think kind of not. And the reason being: people are sharing location with many more people. And so there's not kind of a level of seriousness about what that means when people are sharing with so many friends. And in some cases, people reported sharing with their exes, sharing with their partner's parents, sharing with friends. When that level of sharing exists, there is maybe not the same level of intimacy or meaning around location sharing that there would be with other kinds of things — like, for example, publicly defining your relationship. Way back when, in the early days of Facebook, you would change your relationship status and people would say, "OK, they've made this Facebook official." I recognize that that's a relic of 20 years ago now. But there are other ways to sort of launch the relationship digitally that carry much more meaning, I think, than sharing location, where you can kind of do that on a whim.

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Brian Mackey: It almost strikes me that maybe turning location off with your partner is the real trust move — the trust, so to speak.

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Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing — and how these relationship trends go — that may be where it's at. We may have a whiplash back into, you know, knowing less is actually better.

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Brian Mackey: The last — one of the big four here — is location sharing for fun. So talk about that. How does this work in practice?

[00:24:06]
Brian Ogolsky: Yeah, this was the one that was kind of strange to me — just not really understanding where the fun is in knowing where everyone is in real time. And the thing I'm thinking about is this idea of FOMO, the fear of missing out. If I see my friends are continuously having fun in other places and I'm not there, I didn't get the invite — that doesn't seem like very much fun actually. But there is a decent number of people that just kind of said, "You know what, it's kind of interesting to know where my friends are." Or the flip side to this category was what we called sort of not caring — that it's just not that serious to share your location. So I share it, maybe I even share it temporarily and then I forget about it and it just continues to be on, and so I share with people I've actually forgotten that I share with. So there was some of that in there too.

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Brian Mackey: Hmm. All right. Well, we are coming to the end of our time, so this will probably be our last question. We're talking with Brian Ogolsky, who has studied the use of [location] sharing in — [uh, lic computer app or I should say] smartphone applications. Are we putting too much faith in these companies? Because your location says a lot about who you are, what you do — and these are still for-profit companies that we are sharing our location with.

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Brian Ogolsky: Yep. I think that's really the most important thing that we think about as we move forward, because the way people talk about these, they talk about them very personally, like they are making choices. But in many ways, as we've sort of started slowly sneaking into an algorithmic society where we are constantly being led into certain domains by companies that have figured out who we are — our digital footprint now also contains where we spend our time in real time. And so there's a lot to think about in terms of what kinds of privacy protections — what do we demand from the companies who own these data. It used to be the case that our privacy was, you know, we made the choice who we tell where we are and what we like, and we've slowly stripped that away, and it's kind of out in the ether.

And so yeah, it's something we talk about at the end of the paper: What does this mean? What protections do we need to demand of the companies who own these data? And when we think about parents of children who have grown up with very little digital privacy — either because we post pictures in real time of children, or because we're allowing their cellphones from a very young age to record their location in real time — what does that mean for their understanding of privacy? And we've got to contend with that.

[00:27:11]
Brian Mackey: Brian Ogolsky, professor at the University of Illinois, thanks so much for sharing your research with us today on The 21st Show.

[00:27:18]
Brian Ogolsky: Hey, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.