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Comment by LolWolf | Hacker News Reader

I have several friends on Find My; it's just much easier when someone is driving or biking than texting them/knowing if they got home safely. Plus, who cares if my good friend knows where I am at any time? If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location. Imo, nobody is looking at my location constantly, and the convenience is worth it.

This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.

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> Plus, who cares if my good friend knows where I am at any time?

I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.

Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.

> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.

Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.

Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?

Nowadays people carry thier cell phone with them at all times, so whats your point?

Yes, they do, but they don't usually share their location to other people 24/7.

What would be the point of that?

Carrying around your phone is sharing your location with your cellphone provider and thus the government. The stasi analogy doesn't make a lot of sense anymore at that point.

Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.

Which is why you decide to just say "fuck it" and share your information with even more people? Did I understand you point right?

There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.

To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.

I don’t see anything wrong with giving an air tag to a child who doesn’t have their own phone. Even if you think modern parents are overprotective (and I do), there’s nothing constricting about giving your child a small trinket that lets you see their location. It’s a small bit of extra security for everyone involved.

I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.

> I don’t see anything wrong with giving an air tag to a child who doesn’t have their own phone.

The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.

Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.

I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".

I have a non verbal special needs child. I will definitely be putting an itag on his shoes

Would you say that is somewhat of a special case and that different considerations apply for this special case?

It should be implemented though that looking up one's location also notifies the person being looked up. That way there is a social barrier to looking up the location indiscriminately.

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