Find Our Friends

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At any given time, 110 people can tell you exactly where James Tatter is.

Every single iPhone user has the Find My app on their phone, which allows them to share their location with friends and family. Increasingly, for young people like James, it's becoming also a form of social media.

Endless Thread producer (and James's sister) Grace Tatter wanted to know how something that seems creepy to some people became so commonplace to others — and how it's affecting our relationships off the screen.

Show notes:

On the Grid: Surveillance as a Love Language (The Drift)

Dodgeball Shuttered By Google, Its Co-Creator Promises To Clone It (Business Insider)

Thinking Critically about Social Media (American Sociology Association)

Talking Tech with Apple's Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue (SuperSaf)

The Impact of Location-Tracking Apps on Relationships (Psychology Today)

Credits: This episode was written, reported and produced by Grace Tatter. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Amory Sivertson, and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Transcript

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0:08.0	take a bit of me time, or a weight off,
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0:28.7	terms of conditions apply. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from
0:34.2	B.U Questrum School of Business. A recent episode looks at how to solve big antitrust problems like common ownership.
0:42.1	Stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview.
0:46.9	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
1:03.3	At any given time, lots of people can pinpoint James Tatter's exact location.
1:05.5	35, 26, 27.
1:06.7	How many people?
1:10.8	Not even he knew until we asked him to count them up.
1:16.2	Wow, there's two, 63, 64, 65, 66 people where we can both see each other's location.
1:17.5	Three, three, four, three, five.
1:20.5	Jesus, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.
1:24.3	So 44 people who have my location by don't have theirs.
1:30.3	110 people have James' location on Apple's Find My app. More commonly referred to by its old name, Find My Friends.
1:34.0	They must have lifted the Macs because for a while I could no long, like if I wanted to
1:37.6	share my location with someone, I would get a notification being like, you reach the maximum.
	...

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