Safety concerns aside, you should trust your partner enough to not need to track them
If a partner demand they have it on to prove they’re not cheating, then they should be looking for a different partner.
The partner demanding that is projecting like a Barco DP2K-32B.
Exactly. My girlfriend will disappear for an entire day and not come home until 10pm. I usually have no idea where she is or what she’s doing (mainly because I forget due to having ADHD), but I don’t worry about it because I know she’ll never cheat. How can a person even be with someone who they don’t trust? Without trust, there is no relationship IMO.
For me, knowing my spouse’s location is just convenient for knowing ETA without bothering her. It’s not really about trust at all
Exactly my thought. It’s nothing to do with jealousy and just kind of convenient if you need to meet up or are seeing if they’re on their way home and can get dinner started or whatever.
Same. We both follow each other and neither of us care. We mostly have it enabled for the “just in case” scenario that anything happens to one of us. We can make sure that we know of our last known location.
I’ve also had her use it one time I was away from home in NYC. And I was too drunk to figure out which subway to take to get back to my hotel. So she walked me through step by step while on the phone with me. It fucking rocked.
I figure if my phone manufacturer and cell providers are tracking me all day, why not also my closest friends and family.
If you can’t trust your spouse without location, tracking, find another spouse.
No they need therapy not another spouse. They shouldn’t have a spouse at all until they’ve fixed their own insecurities.
My girlfriend and I share our locations mainly for convenience and safety. It’s nice to know that she’s 3 tram stops away from home so I can start cooking dinner for example. She’s also terrible at responding to texts and calls though lol
Yeah I know many who just use it as a practical tool in the day to day.
Even know friend groups who use it between themselves (they all live close together)
SnapMap is also very popular, obv less accurate but nice to see who is in town
Same with my wife. I even have it set up for my mother, so I know she’s safe. I don’t understand what the big deal is, as you say it’s a safety and convenience feature, it doesn’t mean you spend the day looking at the app to see where the other person is.
It’s not something I would do in a casual or new relationship, but if I’m with somebody for years, I value their safety over my (perceived) privacy.
And for the people who think this would prevent or bust cheating: lol. They can just turn it off and complain of bad reception, or leave their phone in their car, while they “shop at the mall”. Or just get a second phone. This app is not a substitute for trust
Regarding tech privacy: it’s not like other apps on your phone are not already tracking, I doubt anybody has their GPS constantly turned off. They already know your location, this one feature doesn’t make a difference.
She could text you, no? It seems like getting her to be better at that is better than opening the can of worms involved with location sharing. For example, here’s some bad stuff that could happen:
- phone sells that data to advertisers
- gov’t gets that info and you trigger an alarm (maybe you went hiking a little too close to a sensitive area)
- data breach happens and now crooks know when you’re not home
- SO’s creepy friend sees your location and is secretly stalking you
Etc. Those probably aren’t super likely, but being able to avoid it all entirely with a little better communication sounds a lot better.
Sometimes it’s worth it, like you’re going hiking alone or going to a bad part of town.
Of all the dystopian things, this is probably the most dystopian thing I’ve read lately.
This is horrible.
Most people my age that I know have location tracking shared with SO’s. It’s considered a step in the relationship.
The main reason my wife and I don’t have location sharing set up isn’t because of trust or lack thereof between each other, but because I don’t trust proprietary/commercial location-sharing services.
I’ve been meaning to set up a self-hosted system (mainly because it seems like Home Assistant could do some neat automations with that info), but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
My wife and I have had our location shared with each other for years, but it’s not a “Are they cheating?” thing. I have been married for 14 years and never wonder if my wife is cheating on me. It’s just incredibly useful for seeing how far away one of us is from home to do things like plan dinner prep times, know where to look for a lost phone, etc. If you can’t trust your SO, there is something wrong that you need to address and micro-managing where they are is toxic.
Also, do yourself a favor and use something open source and/or self hosted. Home Assistant, for example, has the ability to track location data for iOS and Android devices and pin that location to a map. Don’t give your location data to corporations to be used for data mining.
Call me old fashioned, but I put it in the same bucket as a prenup: If you’re always prepping your heart and mind for a split, you’ll always have one foot out the door. Not everyone will agree with me, but that’s how I feel and it’s why I don’t have one. Find yourself someone who is ride or die, if you are looking for a lifetime partner. Don’t settle for someone you can’t trust with your life.
That said, not everyone is looking for monogamy for the rest of their life, either, and that’s OK, too.
Call me old fashioned, but I put it in the same bucket as a prenup
I don’t agree. Prenups are passive, they don’t do anything until not needed. all the while this is a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust.
Legally and practically, prenups are anything but passive. They’re proactive tools. They’re usually dormant, but they’re ready to be called into action.
Marriage is different things to different people. Some have every intention to make it work, no matter what. To them, a prenup is an anti-“burn the ship”. It’s a statement.
Also, tools like “find my” are not major breaches of privacy if both parties jointly agree to use them. For me and my family, it’s the ultimate expression of trust. I’m never somewhere I shouldn’t be, and I like my family knowing where I am, for a multitude of reasons.
There are two types of people who a tracker wouldn’t be effective for: those who are in an inappropriate location, and those who are constantly questioning why someone is in an innocent place, regardless of where it may be. However, at that point, the issue isn’t the trackers; it’s the people.
Legally and practically, prenups are anything but passive. They’re proactive tools. They’re usually dormant, but they’re ready to be called into action.
that’s what I meant by passive. they don’t do anything until invoked, once.
It’s like comparing a personal forcefield with an always worn camera and mic that streams your life to google’s personal security subsidiary, if I want to magnify the differences.
I don’t see why what you said makes it not passive. maybe we understand that term differently.
Some have every intention to make it work, no matter what.
that’s how abusers learn they can do whatever they want
Also, tools like “find my” are not major breaches of privacy if both parties jointly agree to use them. For me and my family, it’s the ultimate expression of trust.
I don’t necessarily mean breach of privacy that way. if everyone voluntarily agrees, without “problems”, that’s good. but more that the service provider has access to a fuckton of sensitive data! I can imagine people who accept that… and then who also condemn others for wanting to escape shit privacy invading services
This is like, the opposite of old-fashioned. Calling your wife when you’re on the way home is old-fashioned.
This article is the first time I’m actually hearing about this idea because it never even occurred to me as something people would actually want to do. I frankly don’t see the point of this nonsense. I would much rather talk to my wife on the phone and communicate with her about plans. It’s much more human and normal, and facilitates good communication habits. It takes 2 minutes to give my wife a call and, you know what, I get to talk to my wife! We don’t need technology invading absolutely every aspect of our lives. We don’t need to be constantly plugged in and attached to our phones at the hip.
It also has other downsides, like making it hard to surprise your partner, constant battery drain from the constant location chatter, etc. In fact, it seems like all downside with no actual benefit (setting aside the trust stuff, because it’s pretty irrelevant either way).
I get where you’re coming from, but I loathe talking on the phone. I love talking to my wife, but we do that when sitting down for coffee and breakfast in the morning.
If your partner cant trust you not to cheat then work on your relasionship or end it. Dont do this shit.
My wife always has my location. I regularly go out for hours on my motorcycle and I’ll tell her I’m going for a hour ride and get lost in the woods for 3. Years ago I had to call her to pick me up after a truck decided to go left in front of me and shattered my arm into 4 pieces. Caller her from the hospital bed high as fuck on morphine. She has my location so if I stop responding for hours she can make sure I didn’t wind up in a medical center LOL.
That is entirely different than suspecting you of cheating every moment she doesn’t have eyes on you.
Sure, then maybe enable it before those rides and disable afterward, and send her a text when you’d like her to keep an eye on it.
Keeping it on all the time has tons of potential privacy-related problems since phones a aren’t perfect.
Meh. My location sharing makes no difference to who I DONT want to see my location, your always being watched if u have a smart phone anyways 🤷 turning it on and off is too much effort to be bothered, I got nothing to hide from her.
This. If your partner is jealous, you’re not the problem. If they can’t work through it with you, walk.
People with trust issues are exhausting. Make sure they’re worth it without losing yourself.
Signed, Experienced
My SO gets super jealous/anxious, probably because of all the horror stories in the news. Having access to my location would only make that worse, because then every time I drop a coworker off at home or something and forget to tell my SO, they’ll get super suspicious.
I’d much rather work off trust than need to explain every little deviation from my normal schedule just to avoid some anxiety.
I can’t believe the number of people in here with paranoia and shitty relationships that can’t communicate with their “partner”
My wife only asked me to ‘follow’ her with location sharing because there was a creepy dude in the area who was approaching women. Otherwise we trust each other enough and actually communicate about the things we do. Plus we don’t cheat on each other - there’s enough stress in life without adding to it lol.
RIGHT??? Jesus Christ people… Get some therapy
if you believe the only reason your partner isn’t cheating is that you’d find out via location share; what the fuck is the point?
There’s always gps spoofing via debug mode too. So it’s not like sharing gps is even reliable
Jesus fuck, what did people do with their spouses and kids before phones? Trust them?
Sounds unlikely.
private investigators
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If you have to use these things in a relationship, then you already have a problem.
“safety is certainly a big part of the appeal for many users – so I allow the app to alert him each time I reach my front door.” I’m finding that people are irrationally paranoid these days. They see random acts of violence in the news and think it might happen to them but its so statistically unlikely given these are already unlikely events and these people usually middle class people living in nice areas.
Humans are awful at accessing risk and chance, one of the reasons casinos and lotteries thrive.
Look at fear of flying for an example, all statistics say you are many many many times over more likely to get into a car accident on your way to the airport, than during the flight. Even when the ride to the airport is usually short and the flight very long. Yet people are afraid of flying, but not going by car. By percentage, there are of course those, rightly so, afraid of cars as well.
Risk assessment is probability and severity. The probability can be vanishingly low, but if the severity is astoundingly high then acting like a high risk situation could be appropriate.
Take asteroids. The last planet killer to hit us was 94million years ago. A rudimentary estimate could put the probably as 1:94mil. The severity of an asteroid impact of that magnitude is off the charts, so it is reasonable to consider it a risk and act accordingly to spend resources to search for and track asteroid trajectories.
The severity of abduction, murder, and rape is probably pretty high for most people, so considering it a risk even with a very small probability is not unreasonable.
If you sacrifice freedom for security, then you deserve neither.
If you just see this and, like 20 others, blindly say “you should trust your partner” then you haven’t thought about it at all. If you trust your partner completely, then you trust them to use your location information responsibly, right? So trust does not have any bearing on whether to use it or not.
The issue for me is that we should try to avoid normalising behaviour which enables coercive control in relationships, even if it is practical. That means that even if you trust your partner not to spy on your every move and use the information against you, you shouldn’t enable it because it makes it harder for everyone who can’t trust their partner to that extent to justify not using it.
On a more practical level, controlling behaviour doesn’t always manifest straight away. What’s safe now may not be safe in two years, and if it does start ramping up later, it may be much, much harder to back out of agreements made today which end up impacting your safety.
I trust my family. Trust them enough that they have the passcode to my phone and can easily open it at any time.
But I’m not sharing location. How will I sneak out to buy gifts if they get a notification when I leave work? Nope.
My mom the other day sent me like 5 texts in a row because I didn’t see them while working. Had to stop and tell her “For the past century, if most people wanted to contact their kids they waited months for letters to go back and forth. No need to panic over not talking for a day.”
oh good lord no. years, decades, centuries even couples have trusted each other WITHOUT the need to tracking their where abouts. suddenly this is something we need? no it isn’t. but sure, you go ahead and slap a tag on your “loved one” so you know where they are at all times and so will whatever company is selling your data from said tag.
I didn’t say it’s something you need. Read the rest of my comment.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but I disagree with the premise in the first paragraph. It sounds like the age-old “nothing to hide” argument.
I trust my SO with my location information and I have nothing to hide, but I don’t provide it because they don’t need it. That’s it. Why should I compromise my privacy and potentially security just because I trust someone? That’s dumb. They don’t need it so I don’t provide it, that’s my primary reason and that should be enough.
I have other reasons too, such as:
- I don’t trust my or my SO’s phone manufacturer to keep that data confidential, and I don’t want them selling that to someone
- I don’t trust my government to steal that information en masse, and I’d really rather not trigger some alarm somewhere
- I don’t trust most of the apps on my phone with location information, and I’d really rather not trust my phone’s app security to prevent them from getting it
- breaches happen, and I’d really rather my location information not end up in criminals’ hands
And so on. There’s no upside and tons of potential downsides, so why do it?
They don’t need it so I don’t provide it, that’s my primary reason and that should be enough.
It is enough. In fact, it’s better than the “you should trust your SO” argument which doesn’t make any sense.
This is a huge no from me. My SO doesn’t need my location, and sharing it has a lot of potential downsides, like:
- phone manufacturer selling it to advertisers
- gov’t getting it and I accidentally trust trigger some alarm
- data getting exposed in a breach
- apps without location access getting it through some means
There’s a lot of potential downside and the upside is… my SO knows when I’m almost home?
Yeah, no. Maybe I’ll share if I’m doing something risky like hiking alone, but that’s never staying on constantly.
Call me old school but I just text my SO when I am almost home.
My route has pretty much no stoplights, so there’s not really an opportunity to text. But I send a text when I leave and if I’m delayed (i.e. I’ll have an opportunity to text).
It works well.
I don’t agree with the practice but I do see the point - it reduces anxiety and gives your partner a sense that you’re okay for relationships where trust is strong. For toxic relationships this should absolutely not be a thing.
As far as governments or companies selling the data… You can use some self-hosted services on a de-googled GrapheneOS or LineageOS install and use sattelite location only. Then, pipe that to said self hosted solution that doesn’t sell your data like homeassistant or whatever.
Idk, I think it would increase anxiety for my SO, and we have a lot of trust. For example, if I take a coworker home, go out to lunch, etc w/o telling my SO, and they see that deviation in my routine, they could start doubting that trust. But if they just don’t see it, they just rely on what we tell each other, and if it’s not important, it doesn’t need to be communicated and can’t create that anxiety.
At least that’s my take. My SO is really trusting, but also quite anxious because of nonsense they read on SM and whatnot, so a deviation can create a lot of unnecessary concern.
But yeah, I wouldn’t be completely opposed to a self-hosted solution here. I use GrapheneOS, and if the UX isn’t too terrible (i.e. easy to toggle off and on), it could be really useful for something like going hiking alone or whatever.
if I take a coworker home, go out to lunch, etc w/o telling my SO, and they see that deviation in my routine, they could start doubting that trust
This means there are still significant insecurities in the relationship that can bubble up and become problems, and you know about these.
You do not trust your spouse to trust you and not misinterpret your intentions.
Paradoxally You can defeat some of this insecurity by being transparent and welcoming misinterpretation if you believe you both have full trust in each other.
As a high anxiety person myself, this works to defeat the anxiety which is often feared of the unknown. By proving that deviations to your routine are not something they should feel anxious about, then that anxiety can melt away.
It honestly hasn’t been a big problem, but my SO for some reason invents a bunch of unlikely stuff they have to consciously ignore.
Do whatever works though.
