I’m scrolling through the Find My app on my phone on a Tuesday night. Even though there’s nobody specific to look for, I’m curious where my 65 little dots are spending their evenings. Fellow members of my dance group, Raaz; friends from freshman fall; cousins; roommates, both current and old; members of the Class of 2026 who have graduated — the list of people who have given me access to their location 24/7 goes on.
Although this may seem excessive to some, I know I’m not alone in this. Walk through Novack between class periods and you’ll find dozens of students glancing at a small constellation of moving initials: one of their friends off-campus, a roommate still at the gym, someone near Fahey Hall.
At a school where the entire campus is only a few acres, you’d think there would be little practical need to track where anyone is. And yet, location sharing has become one of the near-universal truths of Dartmouth social life. It is used socially, to arrange plans; logistically, to check where roommates are; and for safety, to make sure friends get home safe.
For those who might not know, Find My — Apple’s built-in location-tracking app — lets users share their real-time location with chosen contacts, either indefinitely or for a set period of time. Once you share your location with someone, they can look at their phone at any moment and see where your “dot” is on their map.
Shane Wattenmaker ’28 estimated that he shares his location with around 90 people, the majority of them fellow Dartmouth students. Ask him how that number got so big and he doesn’t have an exact answer.
“It just collects over time,” he said. “Usually it’s like one person will send their location to someone and they’ll send it back, or vice versa, and you’ll realize, ‘Wow, I know this person really well, why don’t we have each other’s location?’”
However, some of those locations have a clear origin story. On a trip to Montreal with his fraternity, around 20 people agreed to share locations before the trip for safety reasons, Wattenmaker recalled. Although Life360 was floated around, they turned it down in the end, opting instead for Find My.
Wattenmaker said there are various reasons that prompt him to check his location map, ranging from “utilitarian” to social.
“One of my friends was in the class that I literally couldn’t find, so I just stalked [them],” he said. “Or [if] I see a group of people meeting at Foco, I’m like, ‘Wait, are you guys getting dinner?’”
Safety is another reason why he likes to share locations, Wattenmaker said.
“If it’s like 4 a.m. and one friend is still out, I’ll text her, ‘What are you doing, where are you?’” he said.
Camila Taylor ’27, who shares her location on Find My with nearly 50 contacts, also shared locations with her sorority members during a trip to Montreal over sophomore summer, although they chose to use Life360.
“I don’t really check that Life360 group [from the summer] anymore, but sometimes I get notifications that [somebody] is back in their hometown, and I guess that makes me happy,” she said.
Wattenmaker still shares his location with a few members of the Class of 2026, including people he rarely — if ever — texts.
“I’m at varying closeness levels with them, but I personally am fine with them having my location,” he said. “It makes me happy to see people I know and think, ‘Oh, you’re in New York, maybe we can meet up.’”
Compare that to Charlie Yarmus ’30, who only shares his location with 10 people. They’re almost entirely family, with an exception made for his roommate and a few of his high school friends leftover from their weeklong senior year trip.
According to Yarmus, he rarely checks anyone’s location besides his roommate’s, and even then, the reason is more logistical than social.
Checking his roommate’s location for logistical reasons, such as minimizing the risk of causing a disturbance, is “the only time I look at the [my Find My app],” Yarmus said. “Just to see if I need to be quiet before I go into the room.”
For Wattenmaker, the more complicated moment isn’t deciding who to add — it’s deciding who to remove, something that tends to happen only once a friendship has clearly run its course.
“I have dropped people, and then I’m like, ‘Okay, your location needs to go,’” he said. “Once senior year ends, that’s when you start to apply a filter,” he added, comparing the process to unfollowing people on Instagram.
Compared to Wattenmaker, Taylor is a little more hesitant on some of the privacy concerns regarding the practice. She turned off her location entirely for the summer.
“You do not need to know where I am at all times, especially outside of Dartmouth,” she said. “I don’t think people need to know if I’m in the office or working from home.”
Mackenzie Morong ’27 uses location sharing even less, and none of it is through Find My. Part of that comes down to logistics; she has an Android, which locks her out of using Apple’s ecosystem entirely.
“It’s funny — Find My is one of the only things that has ever made me consider getting an iPhone, because people use it so constantly,” she said. “People are always asking, ‘Can I have your location?’ And I’m like, no, you really can’t.”
Instead, she relies on Life360 to share her location with a small circle of her family, and her senior apartment roommates.
“I don’t think it’s the most necessary thing in the world to have people’s locations,” she said.
For students without iPhones, Google Maps offers a lesser-known solution that Morong said she didn’t discover until last year.
“It doesn’t work quite as well, but a lot more people with iPhones have [Google Maps],” she said, adding that most people are sometimes reluctant to download a new app just to accommodate one friend’s phone.
Whatever the number of dots on their maps, most students agreed that the real discomfort lies in unsharing a location rather than adding one.
“People are scared of the notification in the iMessages chat that ‘blank’ stopped sharing their location with you, so I think a lot of people just don’t unshare,” Yarmus said.
Taylor, however, said that she has been on the receiving end of a withdrawn location.
“Maybe a few girls I was friends with and didn’t really talk to after two years have unshared their locations,” she said. “I might have been a little offended … but it’s chill.”
Compared to other schools, I think Dartmouth’s prevalent use of location sharing comes down to the small size of our campus. When our entire social bubbles of classes, dorms, the few dining halls and libraries fit within a 15-minute walk, it feels less like surveilling people and more of an extension of a world where we can already probably guess where someone is.
Whether it’s coordinating a spontaneous hangout, making sure a friend got home safe on an on-night or just satisfying a little curiosity about who’s around you, most Dartmouth students have decided the trade-off — giving up a little privacy in exchange for a little more connection — is worth it.
What happens to all that sharing after graduation when we all go to different cities, time zones and jobs is a different question. But for now, on Dartmouth’s campus, the practice of using our phones to find our friends seems to be here to stay.
Ria Parikh ’27 is a staff writer for Mirror. She is from Cincinnati, Ohio and is majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Philosophy. On campus, Ria is involved in research, dances on the South Asian dance team and is an analyst for Palamedes Partners.
