'We know where you live, pal!' Why does every app want to know my location?

Help me, officer, I’m lost! 'No problem, sir. You’re right in front of me!'

[Photo © 2025 GeoJango Maps]

[NSFW and trigger warnings! Depraved depictions of private parts, casual 1980s sexism and lycanthropy follow. Please don’t read further! You’ll only upset yourself!]

…

“This website is requesting permission to access your location. Yes/No?”

Absolutely not! My personal details are sacred!

I learnt this the hard way. An unfortunate experience with what seemed like a harmless little app – RshnMbstr, I think it was called – taught me not to give away too much.

The app asked perfectly innocent questions about my current address, age, occupation… that sort of thing. Oh and my IBAN, mother’s maiden name, the name of my first pet, the brand of my first car, my favourite movie, the last time I cried, my height, weight, length, girth… well, you get the idea. And the next thing I know, a bunch of nosey-parker call-centre staff started ringing me day and night to ask whether I had just used my credit card to purchase a light aeroplane in Murmansk.

I told them it was none of their business. My personal details are sacred, after all.

People complain about being prompted to accept or reject cookies by every website they visit. Well, being nagged to give away my location is worse. It’s just good technology applied badly – or should I say disingenuously.

Now, the cookie thing is annoying but I get it. There is a sort of naive honesty about a shady online outfit asking a site visitor if they’d mind having their computer carpet-bombed with unethical data-thieving spyware ad grenades. The visitor can then choose whether they will bother to visit that site ever again based on whether or not there is a Reject All Cookies option, albeit hidden 13 site submenu levels down.

If I might make one small request, though? In addition to Accept All Cookies, Reject All Cookies and Accept Essential Cookies Only buttons, I would like websites to include a fourth option: Install A Lifetime Cookie To Remember You Clicked Disallow All Cookies Now Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone.

Talking of lifetimes, it seems a lifetime ago when I consciously made a pact with the Devil to allow Google Maps to follow me around the streets.

If you want to go from A to B, route-mapping systems find it helpful if you agree to tell it where A is. Later in the day, of course, Google Maps nags me to submit “user-generated content” about all the shops and other places I went to, so I just repeatedly tap the option to say I hadn’t visited that place at all and Google Maps repeatedly apologises for its error.

I don’t do this because I’m bothered about privacy. I just get a kick out of making Google apologise to me repeatedly.

Before the rise of the Pandemic That Shall Not Be Named, it was charming to have Google Maps surprise me with an unsolicited notification showing me a map of all the locations it thought I had been to over the previous month or two. London, Belgrade, Paris, Chicago, er… Herne Bay… I would feel a proper little International Man of Mystery. Yeah, baby!

Post-Voldemort-19, that map looks rather sad. Rather than spanning continents, it has zoomed in on my neighbourhood with a little star at my front door and another at the off-licence. Oh, and there’s one at La Quequetterie, a local cake shop I once visited that does a roaring trade in iced phalluses and vulva pancakes.