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title: Why is it so hard to passively stalk my friends' locations?
description: A personal reflection on the lack of good tools for passively notifying friends when you're visiting their city. The author outlines two ideal scenarios —...
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og:description: A personal reflection on the lack of good tools for passively notifying friends when you're visiting their city. The author outlines two ideal scenarios —...
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# Why is it so hard to passively stalk my friends' locations?

**[Terence Eden](https://daily.dev/sources/shkspr)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A personal reflection on the lack of good tools for passively notifying friends when you're visiting their city. The author outlines two ideal scenarios — planned trip overlap detection and spontaneous proximity alerts — then explores why no good solution exists. Key obstacles include social awkwardness, privacy concerns, safety risks, and the absence of a decentralized, privacy-preserving implementation. Existing tools like Signal, WhatsApp, and FourSquare Swarm fall short. The author concludes by settling for manual social media posts and hoping something better emerges.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/why-is-it-so-hard-to-passively-stalk-my-friends-locations/>

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---

Tags: [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#decentralization](https://daily.dev/tags/decentralization)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-is-it-so-hard-to-passively-stalk-my-friends-locations--oz3po6rdi)

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