The Google Maps Pin has become part of our identity, but it’s a bit creepy too

As a small child more than 15 years ago, I was amazed by what I saw on a map of my primary school: ‘You are here’ it said, with a great big dot exactly where I was standing. It actually made me panic a bit: ‘how can they know that?’, I thought. It felt like I was being spied on. Like some unidentified ghost had been watching me all along.

Cultural phenomenon
In the years that followed, that big dot turned into an upside-down red raindrop on almost every digital map: the Google Maps Pin. Jens Rasmussen (Denmark, 1966), the Google employee who came up with it in 2005 really hit on something. His design was way better than the big dot on the plan of my primary school. The thin underside of the droplet means that the location being identified isn’t obscured the way it would be with a simple dot or stripe.

Where that dot had startled me when I was a little girl, the Google Maps Pin later became a natural and indispensable part of my life. And not just my life: everyone knows and uses the pin to find or share locations online. The map pin is ‘a product of pure function that has evolved into a cultural phenomenon’, The New York Times wrote in 2011.

The map pin as cultural phenomenon is clearly on display in the artwork Map by the artist Ram Bartholl (Bremen, 1972). Between 2006 and 2019, he made life-size sculptures of Google Maps Pins and installed them in the middle of cities. It’s his way of telling us that our lives consist of the overlap between the ‘digital world’ and the ‘real world’. We can no longer imagine those lives without the internet or digital technologies and the Google Map Pin is a symbol of that. As confirmed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when it added Rasmussen’s design to its permanent collection in 2014 and temporarily installed Bartholl’s sculpture on its roof in 2019.

Part of who we are (or would like to be)
All the same, the pin has come to mean a lot more in recent years. It’s no longer just an indispensable part of our lives: it has become part of us, of our own identity, of the person we are (or would like to be).

This is mostly down to the rise and popularity of social media. Anybody on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat can view their location and share it with the world. We’re only too happy to do so, as it’s how we show the best version of ourselves.

I remember once when I was 15, I shared on Facebook that I was in a bar. ‘Cocktail bar’, it said, with the pin next to it. What I was communicating with the outside world wasn’t just ‘I’m in this cocktail bar’, but above all, ‘I’m cool because I’m drinking cocktails in a bar’. So the pin didn’t just say something about my location, but first and foremost something about who I wanted to be as a person.

Or later, when I went to live and study in Amsterdam, I typed ‘Amsterdam’ in my Instagram biography and placed the emoji variant of the Google Maps Pin (the drawing pin) next to it. What I was saying wasn’t just ‘I live in Amsterdam’, but most importantly, ‘I’m cool because I live in the hip capital city’.

I still regularly share my location on Instagram to show others what kind of person I am. Last summer, I often used the pin in Instagram stories to show that I was walking in the Swiss Alps. By which I meant – you guessed it – not just that ‘I’m walking in these mountains’, but also ‘I love walking in these mountains and I’m proud of it’.

I’m not the only one who uses the pin this way. Social media is full of people sharing beautiful, fun and convivial places. Tropical islands, festivals, amusement parks, gyms – almost everyone wants to show off their best side online. And we do that using the iconic map pin.

Creepy
But precisely because we’ve taken to the pin so enthusiastically, we tend to forget that there’s something creepy about it too. Without really thinking, we happily share our location with all and sundry: with our family and friends, but with strangers too.

It was something that hit me not that long ago, when a report from Google suddenly popped up on my mobile. It told me, among other things, where I had been in the past month, what routes I had used and how long I took. Without me being aware of it, Google had been collecting data on me for a while. The combination of the GPS sensor in our mobiles, cellular towers and Wi-Fi means that we are constantly being tracked by all manner of apps and agencies. Even if we’ve turned off our location features.

On social media too, we often fail to realize that we’re giving away our data to strangers. When I shared that I was at that cocktail bar, the information was retained by Facebook without my being aware of it. Social media companies collect a lot of personal data, including our ‘likes’ and locations, which they then use to serve us advertisements that will appeal to us personally. They make a lot of money that way. What it also means, however, is that according to the Dutch Consumers’ Association, our privacy is not safe on most platforms. A privacy test that the organization carried out revealed that social media firms harvest a huge amount of our data and/or share it with other businesses.

Precisely who is behind these digital systems and might be watching us is never entirely clear. Fifteen years on, I’m having the same thoughts as I did when I was a little girl standing in front of the map of my primary school. Am I secretly being watched? Is someone peeking at me right now? A bunch of people? If so, who precisely? Questions like this feel even more important now than they did then. That unidentified ghost is still lurking somewhere.