To collect butterflies, you need a net, pins and card. You catch the butterfly in the net, then you pin it to the card. Down in Silicon Valley, the nets are made, the butterflies stuck with red pins to cinema seats and coffee shops.

By now, we’re so used to tracking location that it’s hard to image life without it. Putting a pin in your particular position in place and time is almost a prerequisite of modern life. In one day a person could feasibly use Citymapper to chart a route to Canary Wharf, use Tinder to fish for a nearby banker, go with them to a restaurant and pin the instagrammed meal to the exact moment they finished the cherry cheesecake.

Apps earn their keep by drawing lines from your phone to the world around you. Whether lines through bus routes or into the lives of others, developers are addressing a desire for connection, not just to other humans but to the places we live.

Cities, like butterflies, are chaotic things, and from Sherlock Holmes to Batman we’ve created heroes who can take that mess and put it in order, show us that it makes sense. Geolocation does a similar thing. It gives us rational, clear evidence of our place in the world and of our connection to others. We use it to draw lines to things around us and we choose to be pinned down because we want these lines to be made.

When those lines are collected and tracked, that’s when the personal desire for connection comes up against ethical concerns of how such data should be handled.

The whistleblowing app Whisper has been tracking the location of some of its users, the Guardian reported on Thursday, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed. Whisper’s chief technology officer, Chad DePue, responded by writing in Hacker News that Whisper only uses location data for general issues such as time-zone localisation, “so when we send pushes we know not to send pushes at three in the morning.”

Commenting on this, the security researcher Moxie Marlinspike noted the important distinction between not being able to track users of the app and deciding not to do so: “There’s a huge difference between ‘can’t track’ and ‘won’t track’,” wrote Marlinspike. “Right now you’re claiming ‘can’t,’ but it sounds like you’re squarely in the ‘won’t’ category of having your servers ‘avert their eyes’. I think this understandably makes people uneasy, particularly given the data mining direction it sounds like the company is headed.”

This uneasiness is becoming an all-too-familiar feeling. Stories of data being sourced from social networks and used by companies and governments are becoming uncomfortably commonplace. With the fear of data monitoring, are we shying away from shouting about where we are?

No. Last year’s Pew Research Center’s Internet Project report found that among adult social media users aged 18 and older, 30% said that at least one of their accounts was set up to include their location in their posts, up from 14% who said they did this 2011. As location tracking becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, data mining becomes an ever more accurate option for measuring citizens and consumers. From targeting terrorist activity to targeted advertisements, the potential use of location data spans the chilling and the mundane.

To confront this, the industry mindset towards location tracking needs to change. For those in Silicon Valley, developing apps which use location tracking isn’t necessary a sinister scheme; for many it’s simply a way to provide users with the services they increasingly expect to have in place.

As has already been said, we want these lines to be drawn; we opt to be pinned. So strong is this desire to be situated in time and space and to share the position with others that the idea of tracking location has spread from a periphery feature to one which is required for most apps to function. Geolocation tracking has crept from the edges into the centre of software development and now that it has developers have an urgent ethical responsibility to address the way it is implemented.

In Marlinspike’s comments to DePue, the security researcher underlined the problem of balancing privacy with app functionality: “How do you achieve anonymity and unlinkability while doing things like relevance matching?”

When an app relies on sourcing personal data to function, how can this be squared off against the right to anonymity? It’s a crucial issue and one which, in the face of rapidly developing technology and the rush to create popular software, has been allowed to slip to the sidelines.

If location services are here to stay, clearer principles are needed. In the face of growing transparency in our individual lives, Silicon Valley needs to become more transparent in how it handles data. The butterfly collector needs to show his net.



• Whisper revelations: the facts