Whether used in the workplace, within families or in romantic relationships, geolocation tracking has become an increasingly popular way of monitoring the activities of others over the last 10 years, propelled in particular by the widespread use of smartphones—the most widely used devices for such tracking.
In the case of parental surveillance or employee geolocation, the verticality of the process is obvious : the geolocator gains information on the activities and/or movements of the person being geolocated. As far as teenage peers are concerned, inter-individual geolocation practices are, theoretically, thought to be more horizontal, with fewer social consequences. Indeed, this is what many teenagers and young adults say, when they emphasize the playful side of sharing and collecting their peers’ positions, initially downplaying the problematic events that could arise from misuse of the tool (for example, forgetting to hide their position on the map at an inopportune moment). In practice, however, geolocation surveillance in adolescence reveals more implicit and complex power relationships and strategies for collecting or concealing one’s position (Bruna 2023).
This article is based on an individual interview survey conducted at the end of 2021 with twenty-seven teenagers aged 12 to 18, in middle and high schools located in urban and suburban areas. [1] The aim of this project is to examine the issues, appropriations and misappropriations of social geolocation devices, which are particularly informative about the online and offline presence and activity of individuals in this age bracket. While young girls are more exposed to online harassment and subject to more constraints in managing the audience and content they share (Handyside and Ringrose 2017), this contribution aims to show the extent to which the publicization of their geolocation through socionumeric networks may, more than for boys, expose them to new vulnerabilities in the event of misuse.
In what contexts is geolocation used ?
Geolocation-based surveillance cannot be decontextualized : it is part of an ongoing monitoring frenzy (Aïm 2020) and a dual injunction to visibility (Balleys 2015 ; Boyd 2014) and availability (Davies et al. 2014 ; Marwick and Boyd 2014) in online spaces. At the same time, the youthful frequentation of major communicative platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) has been accompanied by ever more diversified verifications of presence, such as the time of the last connection, the opening of content or the fact of being in the process of writing a reply. Geolocating others is therefore not an isolated practice, external to any other form of tracking, especially as social geolocation devices such as Snap Map [2] also display information on people’s online presence and, for example, their battery percentage.
This geolocation-based surveillance is seen by the teenagers interviewed as an unprecedented extension of surveillance practices customary in the digital age, in that it is primarily of interest for the offline activities of the person being tracked. In this context, geolocation can be perceived as a triple revealer : (1) of lies in a situation of non-conformity between a declared position and the one displayed on the screen ; (2) of friendship and romantic infidelities ; and (3) of the estimated level of sedentariness (does he/she move little from home ?) and popularity of the individual (is he/she often out at night ? Alone ? With whom ?). These presence checks are highly heterogeneous, and therefore do not stop at the sole objective of satisfying curiosity, even if this is often the first argument presented. This third dimension reveals a singular interpretation of geographical position which, when aggregated with other digital traces already collected, can contribute to affecting the representations made of an individual as a result of his or her digital practices. Put another way, the data collected via Snap Map falls squarely within the realm of reputational data, which seems even more pronounced among young people from parents with low levels of education, as Alexandra’s comments attest : “He’s a guy who screenshots, we avoid him in the corridors” or from Marina, 16 : “He’s often in ghost mode, he’s got things to hide.”
Other practices are also of interest. Anaïs, 16, uses geolocation because “it lets you know where your mates are going [during vacations], if they’re moving far from France, we can see if there are any liars too (laughs)”, while Jean-Baptiste, 15, adds : “When I don’t know what to do, for example during the lockdown, I looked to see if people were at home.” The exceptional situation of lockdown reveals that, in adolescent surveillance practices, checking compliance with normative injunctions to stay at home can also justify recourse to this technology for tracking the position of others, whereas an unexpected shift would highlight potential transgressive practices. As personal data, geographical position seems above all to be collected for informational purposes, but can be transformed into a resource when discussed (for example, to provide proof of a past displacement or a suspicious attitude of concealing one’s position).
Geolocation : between play and control
Sharing one’s geographical location in online communication spaces is mainly contractual, especially among teenage girls, who regularly make sure it’s reciprocated : the one who leaves the game can’t keep the benefits of knowing the other’s location for very long. As a result, accepting to share one’s location is reserved for people who can be trusted, particularly among close friends or romantic relationships. This does not prevent some of the girls in the sample from conceding to paradoxical practices, as explained by Émilie, 18 :
I really give it to my closest friends, there has to be a certain amount of trust for me to give it, but at the same time... I’m telling you it’s intimate, but yes, I can give it like that at a party, to someone who says “come on, I’ll give you mine” and I say “go on, then, I’ll give you mine”.
I tell myself that what I give, I can take back, that’s what’s important, I can deactivate at any time. For their part, the boys interviewed also emphasize the playful dimension of geolocating peers, but with the exception of the well-defined framework of sentimental relationships, they stress above all the lesser importance of forgetting. This is why, in our survey, girls are generally more attentive to the access they grant to their contacts. While the majority of boys and girls admit to “learning by making mistakes”, the actions they take as a result do not appear to be identical. Adrien and Thomas, aged 18, explain that they have already “been burned”, but quickly play it down by adding that “it’s the game”. However, after finding themselves in a compromising situation or, a minima, regretting having shared their location with too wide an audience, five of the girls interviewed admit to filtering more carefully afterwards. This is the case of Noémie, 17, who describes a conflict situation linked to an oversight in deactivating the sharing of her location :
Once I told a friend I was at home, but in reality I was at another friend’s place, which she didn’t like at all. I remembered too late that I’d given her access to my map and she knew where I was, and I had to explain myself for I don’t know how long.
As in the case of a non-conformity between expected and revealed position in the context of parental surveillance (Bruna 2022), this situation reveals that the sociotechnical device acquires an evidential purpose, which makes any attempt at contextualization more difficult, while the data displayed on the screen seems to prevail over the word of the geolocated individual.
Location data as a power dynamic
In a smaller minority, two boys admit to having already used the location data to acquire information from teenage girls that the latter had previously refused to pass on, pointing out that the Snap Map betrays an individual’s home address when collected at night or in exceptional circumstances. This was the case for Adrien, 18 : “Sometimes it’s quite practical, like during a lockdown, well... you can see where certain people live, of course (laughs). After that, I’m not going to ring the bell, but I don’t know, it’s just information. Anaïs, 16, reveals that she was a victim of this data harvesting :
I was at home, he wanted to meet up, I said I wasn’t available but he said “you’re at home so it’s okay, we can meet”, he knows that during the day my parents work, I didn’t know what to say, he came over, I didn’t necessarily feel like it, well he didn’t stay long but I felt trapped. Once he sees where I am, it’s too late, you can’t go back.
As far as her geographical position is concerned, the girl seems to be most affected by its irrecoverable nature. In the same way, and because geolocation penetrates the territories of intimacy, the use of this technology affects the fabrication of lies. For girls, Snap Map sharing seems to play a more important role in sentimental relationships than for boys. Even temporary deactivation of the card is accompanied by the need to justify oneself, as 18-year-old Océane points out :
When you get into it, it’s a bit of a confusing game, because look, my girlfriend has her location turned off all the time, so I’m not going to wonder, I’m not going to find it weird, whereas if she had it on but took it off from time to time, I’d have doubts, yes.
Following certain suspicions about her boyfriend’s movements, Louane, 14, initiated the request to share her location with him, which she justified as follows : “There, now we can’t lie to each other anymore”. By establishing the use of the Snap Map as a fully-fledged stage in their relationship, she implies the existence of a before and an after, underlining a disruptive dimension in the social uses of a tool now graced with the power to arbitrate.
Technical skills, self-exposure, and vulnerability
A majority of the teenagers interviewed were uncompromising when it came to the lack of control over sharing their location : "If the person has agreed to be geolocated, I want to say that it’s their problem, if you activate it you take a risk, if you don’t remember it and you get caught, you have to take responsibility afterwards," says Océane, joined by Claire, 15, who says, "there are people who leave their location to everyone so they don’t even remember that they shared it. They don’t ask questions afterwards, it’s stupid." In the words of these two girls with highly educated parents, the burden of blame seems to fall more on the shoulders of the person who "doesn’t know how to do it," rather than on the person capable of exploiting the data collected. These technical skills related to the display and concealment of one’s position, but also the knowledge of the implicit standards relating to the "good practices" of the tools, thus make those who are deprived of them doubly vulnerable, to their ability to protect their private life on the one hand, and to the gaze of peers following a potential oversight or misuse on the other.
However, in our survey, it is young girls from parents with few or no qualifications and from working-class neighborhoods who are more affected by the misuse of the Snap Map and the reputational issues that can arise from it. The practices of the tool appear socially more punitive, for two cumulative reasons. On the one hand, as Margot Déage’s survey on Snapchat (2018) shows, young girls from disadvantaged backgrounds are less familiar with the forms of moderation and self-restraint linked to the use of social media, whether they are recommended by the school environment or by parents with higher cultural capital (of which digital capital is de facto only a component [Granjon et al. 2009]). On the other hand, and while working-class teenage girls most often prefer to socialize elsewhere than in the neighborhood to escape the social control exercised by their male peers, but also to a lesser extent female peers (Blanchard and Hancock 2017), geolocation surveillance could shake up these codes. Collecting geographic position allows us to see both here and elsewhere, and could compromise the preservation of physical territories that escape the gaze of their peers.
As a digital marker of a presence in the physical territories of the city, geolocation therefore fully participates in the hybridization of these spaces (de Souza e Silva 2006), just as it grants the observer an overarching view of the activities, home location, movements and acquaintances of those observed. For the teenage girls in the survey, but also occasionally for teenage boys in the context of romantic relationships, the geolocation of peers seems to translate into a mental burden relating to the permanent management of the data and content that they choose to expose online—or forget to no longer display. As Noémie, 17, points out, “sometimes you forget the map, but the map doesn’t forget you.”
Bibliography
- Aïm, O. 2020. Les Théories de la surveillance. Du panoptique aux Surveillance Studies, Paris : Armand Colin, “U” series.
- Balleys, C. 2015. Grandir entre adolescents. À l’école et sur Internet, Lausanne : Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, “Le savoir suisse” series.
- Blanchard, S. and Hancock, C. 2017. “Enjeux de genre et politiques urbaines : les enseignements d’une recherche à Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis)”, Géocarrefour, no. 91.
- Boyd, D. 2014. It’s Complicated. The Social Lives of Networked Teens, New Haven : Yale University Press.
- Bruna, Y. 2023. “Géolocalisation des pairs à l’adolescence et enjeux relationnels : les usages sociaux de la Snap Map”, Questions de communication, no. 42, pp. 291–312.
- Bruna, Y. 2022. “Usages et enjeux de la géolocalisation dans le contexte de la surveillance parentale”, Tic&Société, vol. 15, nos. 2–3, pp. 127–159.
- Davies, C., Coleman, J. and Livingstone, S. (eds.). 2014. Digital Technologies in the Lives of Young People, Abingdon-on-Thames : Routledge.
- Déage, M. 2018. “S’exposer sur un réseau fantôme. Snapchat et la réputation des collégiens en milieu populaire”, Réseaux, nos. 208–209, pp. 147–172.
- Granjon, F., Lelong, B. and Metzger, J.‑L. (eds.). 2009. Inégalités numériques. Clivages sociaux et modes d’appropriation des TIC, Paris : Hermès-Lavoisier.
- Handyside, S. and Ringrose, J. 2017. “Snapchat Memory and Youth Digital Sexual Cultures : Mediated Temporality, Duration and Affect”, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 347–360.
- Marwick, A. and Boyd, D. 2014. “Networked Privacy : How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media”, New Media and Society, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 1051–1067.
- de Souza e Silva, A. 2006. “From Cyber to Hybrid. Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces”, Space and Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 261–278.
