Location sharing is not a yes/no switch
The timeline post ended on a question: your days make a journal, so who gets to read which pages? Most location apps answer with a light switch. You share your position, or you don’t; the app knows one kind of intimacy, all of it. The predictable result is families negotiating a binary: teenagers who turn the whole thing off, parents who read refusal as secrecy, couples where one person quietly resents the glass wall.
We think the switch is the wrong shape for the problem. Fenzly’s second heart, after the timeline, is a dial.
Your setting, not the circle’s
Start with the part that surprises people: in a Fenzly circle, there is no single “circle sharing level”. Each member chooses what the others learn about them, for that circle, and can change it at any time. Your choice binds nobody else.
Asymmetry isn’t a bug to apologise for; it’s how real relationships work. In the grandparents’ circle, maybe they share everything, because it reassures them, and you share only your arrivals at their place. In the flatmates’ circle, maybe everyone shares a bare minimum. Nobody has to match anybody, and nobody has to leave a circle to stop oversharing. And since circles are independent, the same person can be an open book to their partner and a closed one to the football team.
The four notches
Off. You’re in the circle, the chat, the SOS net, but you’re invisible on the map and your stops go nowhere. Belonging without sharing is a legitimate mode, not a protest.
Latest position. Others see one dot: where you were last seen. Each update replaces the previous one, nothing accumulates, there’s no trail to scroll back through. It answers “roughly where is she?” without ever answering “where has she been?”. A good default for friends.
Circle places. The family-life mode. Members learn your arrivals and departures at the circle’s shared places, home, school, grandma’s, and nothing else. A stop anywhere else shows up as exactly that: “Private place”, an event without an address. They know you got to school; your life between the circle’s places stays yours.
Everything. Your timeline, names included, and your trips, for the people you trust with it. Within a close family this is often mutual and comfortable; it’s also the only notch most other apps ship, which says something. An optional extra, detailed trips, makes a shared trip clickable, with route and stats, for the circles you choose.
Across the dial, one more layer exists for the moment rather than the mode: the ephemeral live share, one tap, time-boxed or until arrival, stopping by itself. “Watch me get home tonight” shouldn’t require re-tuning a relationship setting, so it doesn’t.
A real setting, not a display filter
Here’s the part that connects this post to the whole series. In many apps, “sharing settings” are a courtesy the interface performs: the data flows, the recipient’s screen hides some of it. Fenzly’s modes are enforced where it counts, at the sender, before anything exists to hide. Your mode decides what your phone seals into per-member envelopes in the first place. On “latest position”, your stops are never emitted at all, to anyone; on “circle places”, the rest of your day never leaves your device. What you didn’t share doesn’t exist outside your phone, and the server relays envelopes it can’t read either way.
A display filter can be patched, subpoenaed or breached around. An envelope that was never created can’t.
The honest limits
Three, as usual. The dial bounds data, not humans: someone you share with can still screenshot a map or repeat what they saw, so the real setting remains who you let into a circle at all. “Private place” hides the where but not the that: circle-places members can see you stopped somewhere, which is the trade for a timeline that stays coherent. And a child’s dial is set with their guardians, which deserves its own careful post.
The light switch forced a choice between being watched and being absent. The dial’s bet is that most families, given the vocabulary, will settle somewhere in between, and stay there happily.
Next in the use-case chapter: your runs, rides and hikes, speed, distance, climb and GPX export, without feeding a social network. Fenzly as the sports tracker that keeps your training to itself.