(energetic percussion music)
- According to this, he should be right here.
- [Joanna] So what's happening here?
Well, that's me.
And that's my friend Aldo.
No, really, his real name is Aldo.
I checked his Costco card and everything.
I don't know who you're thinking of
but this Aldo is an actor who sometimes likes
to hide around town and help me test location sharing apps.
- Yeah, it's great.
My whole life people have been adding a W to my name.
Like it's so funny.
- [Joanna] Anyway, Apple's Find My Friends
location sharing and Google Maps and an app called,
Life360, have become very popular
amongst groups of friends and families.
They all work similarly.
You share your real time location with a person
and maybe they share it with you and then you
can see each other on a map,
right down to the specific address.
Yes, it can be very, very precise.
Creepy?
Absolutely.
But there are some good reasons to use these.
And if you're convinced, which ones best?
That's why Aldo's here.
Wait, where's Aldo?
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Aldo, has an iPhone on him
with those three location sharing apps.
I requested his location through each of the apps
and he accepted.
He also has the ability to turn location sharing
with me at any time.
But before we get into which one works best
let's consider why you may want to track someone
like Aldo or why you may consider someone tracking you.
I have two reasons.
Number one, meeting up.
Whether you're meeting a friend in a park
or at a restaurant, you can see your whereabouts
instead of texting back and forth.
Google and Apple let you limit the sharing of your location
to different periods of time, say an hour or two.
Or you can choose to share indefinitely.
Number two, safety.
People use these services to make sure friends
have gotten home okay in a cab or Uber.
Parents use this with kids of all ages.
Focused on families, the Life360 app
has features for tracking new drivers.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to track.
Notably, you give up your own privacy.
And also, you can get anxious when the tech
doesn't work right.
Also, stalking, yes, the list goes on.
If you decide to share your location,
make sure it's with someone you know and trust.
Okay, so which one is the best?
Test one, standing still outside.
Let's see which of these let's me find Aldo
outside the easiest.
So all three of them seem to have him in the same place.
Guess, if I bear to the left here sort of by the water.
Winner of test one,
Found you.
- Never.
- Apple and Life360.
They plotted him faster and more precisely.
Test two, on the go.
But what happens when Aldo is in a car or a horse.
Each of the apps update location at different intervals.
If you have Apple's app open it will refresh every minute.
When Life360 is open, it refreshes every three seconds.
Making it way easier to keep tabs
on a moving vehicle or animal.
Yep, he's coming in across Central Park south right now.
Winner of this round,
Found ya.
Life360.
Life360 and Google also show you the remaining
battery percentage of the person you're tracking.
Sadly, Apple doesn't.
Test three, inside a building.
Yep, Aldo decided to go to work today.
The GPS can get close and give you an idea
of what indoor location someone is in.
But often it puts them right outside it on a map.
According to all three apps, he should be standing
right here in the middle of 47th Street.
Winner, none of them.
They all plotted Aldo in the middle of the street.
Your decision should really come down to privacy policies
and what phone you have.
Apple's policies are the best.
It retains your location data for just two hours.
Google, not so much.
It requires that you enable a setting that let's Google
keep a record of every place you've been.
It can use this data to show you more targeted ads.
Google does offer a tool to auto delete this data.
Life360's policy says your data
could be used for advertising
and there's no way to currently delete your location
data from it's servers.
If you've got friends and family with iPhones and Android
phones go with Life360.
I found it to be better and faster than Google Maps.
If you've got an iPhone and friends and family with iPhones,
go with Apple's Find My Friends.
Or what's going to be called, Find My in IOS 13.
I've decided to use Find My Friends with some of
the closest people in my life.
Which basically now makes me Aldo.
(classical music)