| Hi everyone. If you were really my friend, you’d share your location with me — right? But first... Three things you need to know today: • Chip industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan leaves Intel’s board
• Mitsubishi is struggling to keep up with demand for data center parts
• Peloton showed signs of a turnaround, triggering its biggest rally I love sharing real-time locations with my friends. Over the last couple years I’ve gradually persuaded about 20 friends to let me track their whereabouts 24/7. And in turn, I give them mine. We mostly use iOS’s Find My app, plus a few Android-user friends with Google Maps’ location-sharing function. Whenever I want, I can open up the app and gaze affectionately at my collection of little friend-dots on the map, drifting around the city, the country, or sometimes the globe. Like many emergent tech habits, the initial appeal was convenience. When a friend plans to pick me up to go out to dinner, she doesn’t have to text to warn me that she’s a few blocks away — I can just watch her dot get closer and step out to the curb as she pulls up. It can also lead to serendipitous delight. A couple months ago, I was killing time in the airport for a delayed flight when I got a text from two friends who happened to have landed a few gates away. They saw my dot on their map and swung by for a quick hello. Over time, sharing locations — at least among my cohort — has morphed into a token of digital intimacy and trust. You can keep an eye on a friend who’s out on a date and make sure they get home safely. I can see that, as I’m writing this, a couple of dots are heading out to Nevada for Burning Man. The digital habit has also grown more popular among younger generations. Some in Gen Z see it as a rite of friendship or a milestone indicating closeness. They’re familiar with the gesture from Snapchat’s Snap Map; in February, Instagram also tested similar location-sharing features. Younger kids might be even more used to getting tracked by loved ones — i.e., their parents. This week, lots of kids head back to school, which means new bus routes and schedules (and some nervous parents). Apple Inc. is marketing its Apple Watch for kids including this promise for guardians: “Know where they are.” If children are too young for a smartwatch — or if that gadget is too expensive — some parents simply put an AirTag in their kids’ backpacks so they can watch when their dot arrives at the classroom. In recent years, Apple has steadily nudged its users to share locations in a more social way. Find My iPhone has existed since 2009 for utilitarian, lost-device emergencies. But now, if you open an iPhone text message conversation and type “I’m at,” you’re prompted to share your live location. In iOS 17, if a contact already shares location with you, their current city shows up in your text message view. Siri sometimes even suggests, unprompted, that users initiate a “Check In” with certain contacts, which includes sharing location. (Some users found this feature invasive and hard to turn off.) Your real-time location is incredibly sensitive information, which means it could easily get misused. In a high-trust relationship, swapping locations can bring closeness, but in the wrong situation, it can lead to awkwardness, danger or abuse. It also makes me think about the broader lifecycle of tech features. They start off feeling like magical conveniences — internet on your cellphone! Turn-by-turn maps! But once they’re more widely adopted, the tool morphs into a necessity. It can breed helplessness (forgetting how to read a paper map) or burdensome expectation (expecting that you check your inbox while out on a hike). Social location-sharing is pretty early on the adoption curve. But it might eventually evolve into a demand, or another way for us to erode our own privacy. For now, it’s still fun, novel and mostly harmless … right?—Ellen Huet Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch was confirmed dead after Italian authorities recovered five of six bodies missing after a tornado sunk Lynch’s luxury yacht off the coast of Italy. The British tech tycoon was celebrating with friends and family after his recent acquittal on US fraud charges connected to the 2011 sale of his software company. Workday overcame lackluster results by saying the company will boost profit over the next three years. Uber plans to offer self-driving Cruise cars beginning next year. Elon Musk’s brain-computer company Neuralink said a surgery to implant a device in a second patient “went well.” US chipmaker On Semiconductor has picked a sleepy Czech town for a new $2 billion factory. | 
