Notes from the people who build Silbame.https://silbame.app/blog/enhttps://silbame.app/blog/every-position-has-an-age/https://silbame.app/blog/every-position-has-an-age/A dot on a map says where someone was, not where they are. Silbame puts the age next to every position, so you know how far to trust it.Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT<p>A location app shows a dot. The dot looks like “here, now”, but it is always a position the phone sent at some moment in the past. Sometimes that moment was 5 seconds ago. Sometimes it was 2 hours ago, because the phone was in a tunnel, out of battery, or simply resting on a table.</p> <p>If the map does not tell you which, you guess. So in Silbame every position carries its age.</p> <h2 id="what-you-see">What you see</h2> <p>Next to each person in the list there is a short label:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Live · now</strong> while you follow someone Live. The phone sends a new position every 5 seconds.</li> <li><strong>4 min ago</strong>, <strong>38 min ago</strong> when the last position is a few minutes old. This is normal: outside Live the phone reports less often, to save battery.</li> <li><strong>2 h ago</strong> or older when the phone has not reported for a while. The dot stays where it was last seen, and the label says how old it is.</li> </ul> <p>The same label is on the map and on the person’s page.</p> <h2 id="why-not-just-hide-old-positions">Why not just hide old positions</h2> <p>Because an old position is still useful. If a rider’s phone loses signal in a valley, the last position and its age tell the support car where to start looking. Hiding it would remove the one thing you know.</p> <p>What matters is that nobody reads a 40-minute-old dot as “now”. The age label does that job.</p> <h2 id="why-the-phone-does-not-report-every-second">Why the phone does not report every second</h2> <p>Positions cost battery. Live sends one about every 5 seconds, so it runs only while someone has your card open, up to 30 minutes at a time. Outside Live, the phone sends a position when it moves and rests when it does not. We measured what that costs on a real phone in a field test, and will publish the numbers and the method in a report on this site.</p> <h2 id="sharing-has-an-end-time-too">Sharing has an end time too</h2> <p>The age tells you how fresh a position is. The end time tells you how long someone shares at all: for one hour, until the end of the day, or until they stop it. When sharing ends, their dot stops updating, and you can see that it stopped.</p>productprivacy