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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, I'll wrap up today's show for our last 15 minutes or so with a little experiment and the question, who do you track on your phone and why, and who tracks you? 212-433-WNYC. Who do you track on your phone and who tracks you? 212-433-9692.

Here's the experiment. Those of you who have an iPhone ready. Open up your Find My app and take a look at the People tab. Do you have access to anyone's location? You may not even know that you do. Can you see where your child, partner, or any of your friends currently are? Maybe there's someone unexpected tracking you. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Who do you track on your phone if you already know that you do this, and why? Who do you allow to track you? 212-433-9692.

Why do I ask? Well, for many, location tracking isn't the privacy nightmare it used to be. Gone are the days when you had to call people to find out where they were at any given time and trust that they were where they said they were. Apps like Google's Family Link, some of you use that, and Apple's Find My, can show you on a map where your loved ones are without any sort of contact.

These location-tracking apps are incredibly popular. For those of you who don't know, the Life360 app has 33 million active users in the United States alone, showing just how universally normalized it has become to share your location with your inner circle, no matter how you define that, at all times of the day.

Listeners, are you one of those 33 million people who have downloaded Life360? Do you use any of the other location tracking apps on the market? Does it concern you that your inner circle knows where you are at all times if they choose to look? Do you ever have a moment when you're looking at someone else's location and feeling like you're invading their privacy? Why do you use these apps? Who are you using them with? Who are you tracking and why? Who's tracking you? How do you feel about this whole thing? 212-433-WNYC. Call or text 212-433-9692. We promise not to track you, but we will take your calls right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now to your calls on who you're tracking on your phone and who's tracking you. Elijah in Morristown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Elijah.

Elijah: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. Who do you track?

Elijah: I track my mother, my sister, two of my friends, my girlfriend, my aunt, and my cousin.

Brian Lehrer: You may be the record holder. I don't know.

Elijah: Yes, I've got quite a lot. It just happened that way. My mother and my sister and my girlfriend all want to track me. With my friends and my aunt and my cousin, it was more out of convenience. They needed to know where I was going to be to pick me up one day. I needed to know the next day, and so we share locations and just never turned it off. That started years ago, and there, they are still there.

Brian Lehrer: Any downsides of this? Do you ever look in on people and think, "Ooh, it's a little creepy that I'm looking in on them, or vice versa"?

Elijah: Well, I do construction work with my aunt, and so sometimes when we are going to meet for a project, we'll both be up early in the morning and check each other's location to see if the other one's left yet, not realizing that we were both waiting for the other one. That's the only downside I've had so far.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Elijah. I'll save a glass of wine for you on Monday night. Some people get that.

Elijah: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. All right. If I thought Elijah might be the record holder for number of people tracked. William in Manhattan is going to be a competitor for that, I think. William, you're on WNYC. Hello.

William: Hi, hello. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: You track how many different people?

William: Yes, I have like 25 people that I track, mostly friends and then my two sisters.

Brian Lehrer: Is everybody aware that you're tracking them?

William: Yes. I think it's like a level of friendships, like when you get close to someone, that's like official. With most people my age, if you're tracking someone, that means you're close. It's also a way to, if you go out late at night, just to make sure that that person got home. Before I go to bed, I make sure everybody is where they are. I have two older sisters who are 30. They don't really like it, but I convinced them to give me their location just to make sure. Yes, I think with people my age--

Brian Lehrer: What was their initial objection?

William: They were like, "Why do you want to track me?" [laughs] I was like, "What? What do you do?" [unintelligible 00:05:23]

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] That's what you did. That's how normalized this has become.

William: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Why did you, actually? Besides this is what people do, was it so you could always be in touch for the sake of their safety, if need be?

William: I think that's part of it, but also it's just like if you're at the park, you see someone's [unintelligible 00:05:45], you're like, "Oh my God, I'm at the park too." It's just a cool thing.

Brian Lehrer: Social connection too.

William: Social connection, yes. I think-- Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Thanks for checking in. Elise in Midtown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Elise.

Elise: Hi. I have one person I track and they track me. It is my friend-- I live in the city. My friend lives in New Jersey. Whenever he comes to visit me, it's always a big ordeal because he's very directionally challenged. I tried to point him towards [unintelligible 00:06:15] and ended up in Hudson Yards, like almost at the river. [laughs] We track each other on our map, so I'm like, "Okay, go this way."

Brian Lehrer: Sounds like he doesn't need a tracking app. He needs GPS.

Elise: Exactly, yes [laughs].

Brian Lehrer: You help him get from place to place. Who's the other one?

Elise: The other one is the friend group thing we have. My friends just help each other get home safely. We go out late at night, and we just check in because sometimes you forget to text when you're home, so you're like, "Oh, did she get home okay?" That's how we use it.

Brian Lehrer: Has there ever been an intervention between any of you, or just kind of good to know it's there?

Elise: Luckily, no. Luckily, it's always been an intervention. It is funny because sometimes, I'll decide to have one more on the way home. I'm like, "Oh, I wonder if she thinks [laughs] I got lost." Nothing bad so far.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, Elise. Hope that stays that way. Thanks for checking in. Dana in the Rockaways, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dana.

Dana: Hi. Yes, so I actually track- the majority of the people I track are my single women friends. It started when I was also single and going on dates and saying, "Hey, I'm going on a date with this guy. Here's my location." We just ended up sharing indefinitely. I think I'm up to six or seven friends that I track. Most of them are single women, and it's predominantly because we want to rely on each other for safety just in case. There's so many things that could happen.

It's actually very weirdly been poignant in the sense that one of my friends was in an area that had a mass shooting, unfortunately. I checked on her, and I was like, "Are you okay?" It was just a very surreal kind of thing to be like, "Where's my friend?"

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Wow. If somebody who's a woman friend of yours was getting into any kind of trouble on a date, forget the mass shooting, just like some creep on a date, do you have a system where they could ping you in some way and you know what they are, but you also know you have to do something?

Dana: Yes, actually we do. There's a specific emoji that they'll just text me, and I'll be able to find their location and either go, try and get them, call them, something along those lines to get them out of the situation.

Brian Lehrer: Dana, hope you never have to use it. Thank you for explaining it. How far and wide are people listening to this show? Here is Em calling from Uganda, Em says. Hello from New York., Em. Thanks for calling in.

Em: Thank you so much for having me. Yes, I listen to your show every day when I'm back stateside, and now I'm happy that I have data that I can listen to you here.

Brian Lehrer: That's awesome. You use a tracking app there?

Em: Yes, Find My. I track my family and my friends here as well. Because I'm in Uganda, my family just needed a little bit of peace of mind to know where I am constantly. They check my location, so my mom's like, "Okay, she's moving, where's she going?" Then, she calls me a few hours later to make sure I've arrived safely.

Brian Lehrer: Do I see correctly that you're in the Peace Corps there?

Em: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: What kind of stuff do you do?

Em: I do health promotion. Basically, we're working on HIV prevention, malaria awareness and prevention, stuff like that.

Brian Lehrer: That's awesome. Thanks for checking in on tracking. Continued good luck over there and good service.

All right. Here's the anti-tracker. We've had all of you calling in saying who you track and who tracks you and why. Interestingly, we haven't had anybody calling in to say you track your kids, your teenagers. Jen in Montclair, I think is calling in to say that she doesn't. Is that right Jen? Hi, you're on WNYC.

Jen: Hey, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Jen: Thanks. I have a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old and I don't track them. It's a hot topic among my friends, and I'm a bit of an outlier. I guess, one, I really think teenagers need more freedom than they have. Probably more so, it's such a black hole of anxiety wondering where your kids are and if they're okay, that I don't. I just feel that it's easier to let them live their lives and believe in their decisions.

I told the screener and I'll repeat that, they know they have to get back to me rather quickly if I reach out to them, and that our family rules will change if they don't. So far, they're really good about letting me know that they're okay and where they are.

Brian Lehrer: You think that there's less of a chance of something actually happening to them without the tracking than there is of you being in a state of anxiety all the time because you'll check and you'll check and you'll check and you'll check, right?

Jen: Well, yes, that, and I also think it's hard to tell your kid that you trust them if you're watching them on your phone screen and every step they take.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely.

Jen: It's a little bit of both.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Jen is going to be the last caller. We should probably do this again just for parents and have that part of the conversation. I will note as the last word on this that multiple people are texting us to remind us about the person on Vanderpump Rules who tracks more than 50 people. Yes, we know.

That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen edits our National Politics podcast. Our intern this term is Ethlyn Daniel-Scherz. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. I'm Brian Lehrer. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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