I think it was "Every Breath You Take" in 1983.
Or maybe not, "I'll be watching you" sounds more like stalking than love, come to think of it.
From The Drift Magazine, Issue 14 | December 11, 2024:
A full-page ad in a November 1990 issue of Fortune magazine features two dozen men in dark suits turned away from the viewer. Standing in neat rows, most blend together in a uniform mass. But three are singled out, with red targets pinned to their backs. The text below the shadowy tableau reads: “Wouldn’t it be great if new customers were this easy to spot? Now they can be.” Bullseye.
The spread was for Lotus MarketPlace, a collaboration between Lotus Development Corporation, a spreadsheet-software tech giant then valued at over one billion dollars, and Equifax, one of the country’s largest consumer credit agencies. Lotus MarketPlace contained detailed profiles of 120 million Americans, including their names, addresses, phone numbers, marital statuses, estimated household incomes, and purchase histories, all filed into lifestyle categories such as “cautious young couples” and “inner-city singles.” For $695 (about $1,600 today), a company could purchase eleven CD-ROM discs of consumer data covering half the U.S. population.
In a Wall Street Journal piece that ran just after the Fortune ad appeared, a Georgetown professor was quoted describing the product as “a big step toward people completely losing control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.” A staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union said that Lotus was “stretching for the broadest interpretation of the law and looking for ways to get around its intent.” The article ricocheted through nascent cyberspace, finding its way onto message boards and email lists where angry netizens encouraged one another to call Lotus to insist that their names be removed. This online backlash quickly grew into a coordinated attack, with phone calls and letters overwhelming Lotus’s headquarters.
Nine months after the product was announced, Lotus’s president publicly acknowledged the “volume and tenor of the concerns raised” as well as the insurmountable expense of removing the over thirty thousand people who demanded to be taken out of the database. Lotus MarketPlace was canceled before it even launched. Today, this triumph of privacy advocates reads like a false dawn. In the decades since, we have indeed, as the Georgetown professor warned, completely lost “control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.”
And we know how it happened. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, Google realized that it was sitting on a monetizable surplus: the data produced by people’s engagement with its search engine could be wielded to customize ads. And then it discovered that the more precisely those ads were targeted, the more lucrative they became. Google’s data was richer and vaster than Lotus’s — a combination of search histories, IP addresses, and metadata that could paint a picture of what a specific person in a specific place at a specific time wanted to do, know, or buy. Google’s approach was stealthier, too. The company updated its terms of service to note, without explicitly mentioning advertising, that it was stockpiling this information “to improve the quality of our service and to better understand how people interact with us.” Facebook and data brokers like Acxiom quickly followed suit, refining ad-targeting algorithms and accumulating massive data sets of consumer profiles. By the late 2000s, smartphones provided new sources of data, harvesting information all day long, not just when people were at their computers. There were no more full-page ads in popular magazines. Just terms of service in miniscule fonts, manipulative interfaces, and other tricks of the magician.
The result is that we are now locked in innumerable contracts through which we surrender our personal information for convenience or pleasure — for better search results, faster delivery, more helpful recommendations, thimblefuls of dopamine. We feel conflicted about these agreements, but also powerless to amend or terminate them. Even the “techlash” of the late 2010s — when scandals like Cambridge Analytica and high-octane critiques like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ended the era of unquestioned techno-optimism — did little to free us from these arrangements. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 73 percent of Americans feel that “they have very little to no control over the data collected about them by companies.” And yet, we still turn over our information voluntarily for trifles — FaceApp, which demands full access to cameras and camera rolls in exchange for filters that add or subtract twenty years or twenty pounds, has been downloaded by over 350 million people across the globe. We are burnt out, fatigued, addicted. We talk casually about our Big Tech overlords, more or less accepting our debased roles in their fiefdoms.
But there is something more insidious happening, too. Technology companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy that our attitudes toward privacy more broadly have also been warped. Just as in the era of the PATRIOT Act the national security state insisted that it was virtuous, even patriotic, to give in to the intelligence machine, tech culture now ascribes its own virtues to the forfeiture of privacy: realness and connection. Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly, monitoring and being monitored by loved ones through social media platforms like BeReal and location-sharing apps. It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors. Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.
Find My Friends, an app that allows people to track their consenting contacts’ whereabouts in real-time, was introduced in 2011 with the launch of the iPhone 4S. In the app, you can set up alerts for when someone enters or leaves a specified location. Or, you can simply treat Find My as a live map, and watch your targets strut around the neighborhood, the city, or the globe. In 2019, Apple merged Find My Friends with Find My iPhone, which geolocates Apple ID-linked devices. Now, the streamlined Find My app (represented by a green target with a blue bullseye) takes care of both, as if friends are also expensive possessions to track in case they get lost or stolen. And location-tracking is not limited to Find My: Google Maps offers the same, and Snapchat, for example, has a similar feature called Snap Map, which the company claims is accessed by over 350 million users per month.
What might have seemed, not too long ago, like a dangerous act of exposure has rapidly become a security blanket and a source of recreation. Location-sharing apps allow parents to track their adolescent children, and adult children to keep tabs on their senescent parents. Marketed as “family safety” solutions, location-tracking apps like Life360 offer more than just real-time location data. They also maintain a database of your family’s movements, storing up to thirty days of precise location history for every member of your “circle.” There are even smartwatches and other GPS devices designed for kids who don’t yet have phones; the Wizard Watch, for example, says it “gives guardians the confidence to allow their loved one to explore the world outside, without the stress and fear of wondering where they are or if they are safe.” In these duty-bound dynamics, there may be a clear sense in which the person tracking is responsible for the well-being of the person who’s being tracked — one party gives up privacy in exchange for care.
In friendships and intimate partnerships there may be good safety rationales to turn on location sharing, but there’s nothing in the implicit relationship contract to suggest that one person can monitor the other’s whereabouts. Still, it can be entertaining to track the people in our lives. As one 22-year-old Find My user who habitually retrieves ten friends’ locations told Vox, the app “is so, so common among basically everyone I know, just for safety reasons but also for fun.” A 2023 TikTok featuring a screen recording of the Find My interface overlaid with a GIF of Pedro Pascal eating a sandwich and the words “Me checking find my friends to make sure all my sims are where they’re supposed to be” garnered nearly ten million views, one million likes, and countless videos riffing on the format. This kind of location-sharing turns friendship into a video game. And if it’s all a game, there’s no reason to object.
Those who celebrate the fun side of location-sharing apps don’t talk about them in terms of control; they talk about convenience. Apps like Find My save people who are always down to hang from the effort of texting, and enable spontaneous coordination in a globalized, expeditious present in which friends are literally hard to find, stochastically whizzing across and between cities. But what’s really disturbing — and representative of how this technology is changing relationships — is how people talk about mutual location-sharing like it’s a badge of intimacy, the implication being that truly close friends deserve to know everything about each other, including minute-by-minute coordinates. The same Vox article describes the phenomenon as “the next step in digital intimacy after following someone on Instagram.” And some say that it makes their friendships deeper. In The Paris Review, Sophie Haigney (a Drift contributor) cheekily declares Find My to be her “favorite app” and recounts using it “constantly and impractically” to check on her loved ones. “I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way,” she explains. In a poetic apologia for the app published in the New York Times, the novelist Kathleen Alcott muses, “Find My Friends rewards a groundwork of trust that’s already laid, magnifying what we know to be true about the people we love through the changes in place that express it.”
In his landmark work from the middle of the last century, sociologist Erving Goffman theorized that in any social interaction, individuals are like actors who tailor their performances to their audiences and their contexts. Building on Goffman’s ideas, media scholars like danah boyd have used the term “context collapse” to describe how social media demands a unified presentation of the self to distinct audiences simultaneously. Unlike face-to-face interactions — in which we present ourselves differently to family, friends, or colleagues — social media forces us to speak to all of them at once. It also introduces another audience member: the algorithm. Whenever we communicate online, we communicate to a collapsed version of our social worlds via a medium that is structured to maximize engagement — by prioritizing the extreme, or the enviable, or the seemingly successful. And so we find ourselves further and further from anything that resembles our complete “self,” presenting ourselves as — per a popular meme — professional on LinkedIn, wholesome on Facebook, slutty on Tinder, and stylish on Instagram. Location-sharing apps, on the other hand, can offer the illusion of remaining whole. They entice in part because they seem to counter the distortionary, performative aspects of social media. They allow us to exercise our desire to rein in our audience and banish the always-lurking algorithm, sharing a truly unfiltered stream of information with the small group we’ve pulled in close. “In a world where we use social media to broadcast highly curated versions of ourselves,” Alcott writes, Find My furnishes an “antithesis.”....
....MUCH MORE
Speaking of "Every breath you take", in October 2022 we tucked this into the link-vault:
Sting’s startling fortune: Singer earns over £50,000 a month from just one song
Which seems like quite a bit of money for one 42-year old song.
Apparently The Police thought so as well because on August 27, 2025 we saw:
Sting sued by former Police bandmates for millions over lost ‘Every Breath You Take’ royalties