I followed Daniel around for four years on Find My Friends before he removed me from his contact list. We didn't have a single conversation during that time, but I felt like I understood the basic blueprint of his life. About every other day, I would log on and scroll through my people, checking in on my parents and college roommates.

And then, one day — close to a year ago — I realized that Daniel was no longer on my list of friends to find. He had deleted me.

This was, of course, totally reasonable. Daniel and I aren't actually friends. We met in high school, when we regularly competed against each other in speech and debate tournaments. Later, toward the end of college, we spent a day together with a bigger group of people. Somehow, we started talking about Find My Friends, and thought it would be funny to add each other.

For lots of people under 30, location sharing is "simply the next step in digital intimacy after following someone on Instagram," part of a never-ending march to the beat of digital connection.

There's a very specific utility to Find My Friends: safety. It's actual concern that drives you to ask a friend to check on your whereabouts. But there's a whole other realm which is just hyper-intimate social media. It's intoxicating to peer into lives that maybe, in a different universe, could have been your own.

Find My Friends provides a much more unfiltered peek into those lives than what we get on Instagram or Twitter; it's raw and inescapably intimate. You can't curate your way out of your real-time geography.