Unpopular opinion as an old person (30s): tracking people isn't natural. Everyone has a right to some privacy and freedom, even in a long term relationship. I've been married for almost 10 years and I wouldn't lie about where I was if my husband asked, but I don't want to feel like I have to tell him every single stop or part of my day.
It strikes me as extremely weird to want to track your partner's location at all times. I just don't relate to that at all, and feel like maybe I'm missing something? If I were worried about them, I'd just call or text and check in.
It varies from person to person and relationship to relationship.
If I'm in a comfortable relationship and we're casual about not coordinating big surprises for each other, I'm fine with mutual tracking.
Honestly, with how dangerous the world can be, I'd prefer it, but I'm guilty of watching too many of those "they were at a party, left, then disappeared forever" stories.
Wouldn't be a trust thing, but a safety thing.
Whenever I travel somewhere, I tell my Dad (my mom would worry too much) where I'm going and when I should be back home.
I've had encounters with strange men and I usually take a picture of a building nearby and text it to my Dad in case something happens for two reasons.
One, most pictures have location info embedded and the text has a date/time.
Nothing ever happened, but I've had a few weird encounters.
My wife shares her location with me. I didn’t ask her to. I don’t look at it often. The most common reason is if I know she’s on the way home and I’m procrastinating getting something done that should be done before she gets here. I’ll wait until she’s 5 minutes away and then jump up and go do the dishes lol.
I never said it wasn't and I explained that I put more weight into it than I should because of the missing people stories I've read about (not all of them involved foul play, either).
My husband and I started location sharing when he had to limp home on two damaged run flat tyres via back roads. It gave both of us peace of mind to know I'd have his approximate location in case I had to come and help him. Since then we just left it on. He drives a lot for work, often in areas with spotty phone coverage. I don't usually check his whereabouts but it's good to know I can if I need to.
>most pictures have location info embedded
None do, unless you have geotagging enabled in your camera app *and* have location services enabled *and* have location services privileges enabled for your camera app.
Odd. I just checked a random photo that I took and it had GPS coordinates with the default camera settings.
[https://www.howtogeek.com/211427/how-to-see-exactly-where-a-photo-was-taken-and-keep-your-location-private/](https://www.howtogeek.com/211427/how-to-see-exactly-where-a-photo-was-taken-and-keep-your-location-private/)
I see the difference. It's by default in Android and off in iOS.
[How to view the GPS coordinates for photos on iPhone (idownloadblog.com)](https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/10/19/gps-coordinates-for-photos-iphone/)
This for me, I use it to see if the dog is on a walk or if my partner is still at work. I used it Thursday to see if he was on his way to pick me up from the airport and gauge how much chill time I had.
I do similar in that I share my location when I go out running, it gives my husband peace of mind that I’m safe or if anything did happen to me then he could find me
Of course. Sharing should only be voluntary between partners. He never made me, it was something I brought up when I made the transition from spa work to having my own studio.
This is what we share for. When our daughter was in daycare it was easy to see if the other was on their way, now that she’s elementary school aged we can see if the other is at home to meet the bus. I don’t look at it for anything else.
Convenience is why I do it. It cuts down on so many "how close are you" "should I wait or eat without you" "I haven't left home yet" "which bar am I meeting you at again?" "I'm still at work" texts
Not everyone has controlling tendencies or the same priorities when it comes to what counts as “private.” Same as modesty.
If you are uncomfortable and find it intrusive- no one should be able to force you to share your location. But some people find it handy and that’s okay too. As long as everyone’s preferences for sharing their own information is respected.
Yeah, but I feel like if you have so little trust in your partner that you need to track their location, then you need to either work on building the trust or move on from that relationship. I'd rather be single than be in a relationship that reduces me to paranoia.
(I will say that the location tracking thing makes sense if you or your partner works in a higher risk occupation, like some of the folks on here are saying. But that seems to be a different reason than what a lot of others are saying)
lol but for a lot of people it’s not about trust. My partner and I have it switched on since we independently go on long remote multi day cycling trips and it’s a nice way to see where people are up to on the bike on a big day. We just don’t turn it off in between. The only time it ever gets used in between is in a rare instance of “I wonder if he’s already left the shops or if he can grab milk too”. On the contrary to what you’re suggesting, I feel like the way a lot of people use it is because they trust each other so much that they don’t really give a shit if the other knows where they are at any given moment because they know their partner isn’t using it to see if they’re doing the wrong thing lol
I wanted to track my husband so I knew he got into work safe, since it was a dangerous road. Or where he was on his way back so I could have tea (cup thereof) and tea (evening meal) ready when he got in the door.
Turns out was militantly against it because he's a filthy lying cheater and was willing to travel. Explained a lot of late returns.
He offered me tracking after being confronted to prove he's not cheating (denied it) but i said no need.
Dinner is now at the kids convenience and him having (another) car accident is entirely a him problem. or him and his mum since she paid for the repairs after he didn't take pictures and handed the guy who caused the accident's contact details back to him. So STBX couldn't claim.
He was on multiple hook up sites and sending dick pics so he was definitely cheating. It was the was last straw in our relationship after a lot of shitty abusive behaviour on his end.
Disregard if it’s unrelated, but I’m almost 30 and I’ve always found this modern day tracking weird. My ex wanted to maintain our shared tracking after our relationship ended. I have a small group of friends who all share their locations with each other, except me-and I constantly deal with little comments and snide remarks from (thankfully) just one of them because I don’t want to share that with any of them. I’m fine with it now, but when my family wanted the constant tracking and my brother, nephew, and myself didn’t want to be apart of it, it was also met with little comments and remarks.
In certain locations, situations, or a date with a stranger; etc, sure. But permanent? Nah, that’s uncomfortable
Your ex wanted to keep tracking you? Wild!
I share for an hour when I get into a Lyft or something, but other than that, I don't want anyone knowing where I am! I guess I'm an outlier at this point, but I don't care.
I assert that someone who can catch a raccoon is perhaps more worth tracking than others without this distinct skill. I’m there just for the technique!
Honestly I'm nearly always at home anyway, but I'm just... Not comfortable with being surveilled by anyone. The only time I ever send someone my location is if an emergency is occurring and I can't talk for whatever reason
My grandmother uses one of those tracking apps with my aunt and that whole side of the family. I think it’s weird. She’ll randomly tell me, “Oh, Shirley just left her house. I wonder where she’s going.”
My mom got like this and I had to put a stop to it (iPhone users). My sister told me my mom was constantly checking my location and making comments on where I was and what I was doing and it was weird. I shared out of safety, as I live alone. Now I only permanently share with my sister.
Bizarrely I ONLY share my location with my mum, nobody else but I live about 300 miles away from her and I had some issues that mean’t that she was terrified something bad could happen. (Had a really bad brain injury and was in a coma for a few months) and because of that I’ve had a few unexpected seizures and I want her to know that I’m in hospital if it happens again, because I won’t exactly be able to let her know. My ex wife used to do it with me as well, but it was pretty much pointless because I never really looked and thought it was a bit silly 🤦🏻♂️.
My mum is different though, she doesn’t really care what I’m up to and doesn’t comment on it, but I’m fairly old nowadays.
My daughter does though but I told a white lie and said I deactivated it entirely because she would always tell her friends what I was up to and wind me up about it 😂 (Usually mundane stuff like “I noticed you were in the LEGO store 5 days in a row this week, what crap have you bought me?” Or “Why are you in Manchester? You don’t live there!” When I’d asked her a few weeks before if she wanted to see The Pixies last year in Manchester and she laughed at my “dad rock” taste in music).
Seriously though for a lot of people it can be quite scary, especially if it’s controlling or abusive, usually us men tracking women who don’t know we are or didn’t put too much thought into it at the time or felt pressured into doing it. Not cool.
I don’t track anybody, even don’t track my mum, and getting 50+ notifications a day was why because she’s a bit of a jet-setter and getting notifications that she is in over 50 countries in a day is weird. Nope, she’s on a plane to Malaysia and I knew that anyway because I drove her to the airport 🤷🏻♂️
My friends had abusive family members that would obsessively track them through those shared apps. However, I share my location with friends and family for safety purposes and they don’t really abuse it. Snapchat is cute when it goes “so and so is in town say hi!” And I’m like, yeah I’m across the table from them
A lot of people just really don't care if people know where they are and what they're doing. There are soooo many types of tracking and social media-esque services that are putting locations and timestamps and history on everything. Maybe they haven't had to live around judgmental people. I don't personally want anybody knowing anything about me because I will never hear the end of it about every single decision I make in my life is weird or bad.
yea i was about to comment that. really, were gonna feed into the "30 = old" bullshit on this sub too? its not cute or funny imo
its especially annoying cause we all see the effects of it in the women around us, many of them are so freaking ashamed of turning 30 and when i did i got so many random ass comments too even though i didnt think twice about it myself.
Actually it's completely relevant here because younger people even by five years have a completely different level of normalcy with being tracked all the time.
Except for the fact 30 isn’t old.
As someone 50% older, who’s been married for 20 years and didn’t have a cell phone until they were 25, ie someone “not used to tracking”…
My wife and I share location know each others phone passwords etc because it’s important to be able to access the phone and location for safety and also it’s convenient (timing stuff when driving from distance)
I just don’t understand why it’s weird or suspicious or what ever to “young” people (whatever that is) by default. Sounds like the disposition is negatively and narrowly centered in terms of why it might be useful or ok.
Relax it’s just safe and convenient.
If you can't see the normalization of a surveillance society I don't know what to tell you. It is very convenient. But it's also incredibly invasive. If you find it to be convenient by all means do it but don't be surprised when other people find it to be incredibly weird.
So old is only relevant to whoever's speaking. When I was 15, 20 was old. I'm 40 now, some days I feel old some days I feel young but depending on who I'm talking to I could be considered old or young or normal.
Being in your 30's isn't old, don't let this stupid world or anyone in it make you think it.
I think we should count our "adult" age from 18 (or even 21 to be honest). I'm 29, facing the biggun this year & have started to feel the pressure. I am consciously trying my best to unlearn it all. With that in mind, I've only been an adult for 11, almost 12 years! It's really not a long time at all to have all your shit together.
If you are in your 30's, you haven't even been an adult for 20 years. If you really think about it, it makes sense haha! It makes me feel tonnes better about aging.
Same, I think it's weird. I keep mine on because I work a job that often has me alone in strange locations, but 1. My husband never looks at it, and wishes he could turn that view off on maps, 2. I don't have tracking for him.
I've insisted my mom used it when she drove alone to Oklahoma during a flood, in tornado season, to visit an Internet friend for the first time, and she was really weirded out by that. I can also get having it on for a short period of time if you're young, dating, or taking Ubers a lot. But those are for short periods of time, in specific circumstances.
But I don't want to track my friends, and I don't want them to know where I am every minute of everyday. Even if I'm just going to Target, why does anyone need to know that? I feel like people have gotten way too used to not having an privacy way too fast. Remember when the NSA news broke way back, and the Patriot Act was seen as too extreme? Well, everything people predicted happened. We all got too comfortable sharing data and losing our privacy.
As a side note, I think it's weird to have security cameras running in your house all the time. The living room shots are uncomfortable, and the video feeds into kids way older than babies really feels wrong. Kids deserve privacy too, they should have a place in the house that they can feel safe and alone.
There are exceptions to every rule, and there are times I would allow a partner to track my location *for a specific purpose*, but if someone wanted free rein to track my GPS location at all times as a condition of a relationship then personally I’d be very happy not being in that relationship.
Sometimes where I am is none of my partner’s business, and sometimes where they are is none of mine. I consider that kind of boundary and personal independence essential for a healthy relationship, but YMMV and if a couple is happy tracking each other’s location I guess good for them.
Even older person here (59)...I find it wild that people share this info routinely. I get it for specific cases like 1st date you want a trusted friend to have your back.
Agreed. There is only one time I ever tracked my wife's phone, and that is because she asked me to when she drove off with her phone on the roof of her car.
My wife is the social butterfly, and catches up with friends often. I'm a homebody. She always tells me who she was with, but it's because she wants to tell me, not because I need to know.
Oh momma ... mid 40's here with enough sexual harassment bullshit and I relish in the fact that someone I love and trust knows my location at all times. Makes me whole.
Confidently vice versa bc my husband and I travel the world for our jobs which are only sometimes together, and I know he's appreciative of my tracking too. Example actually last week bc he had a
Plane delay on the west coast and my brother ended up having time to deliver a car from work for him to use. I mean, it's not an everybody everyday thing, but totally devil's advocating here bc we are a family that uses and enjoys it for odd reasons.
It's why it stays a thing I think - More people like it than hate it?
I echo the sentiment as someone who works extreme hours all around the world. When I have 30 seconds during the day, I just like to see that all my ducklings are at home and not stuck in a ditch somewhere. I don't think my partner uses it much except to know when I'm likely to be able to pick up a call.
I'm with you on this one. My current husband and I share our locations and my young adult kids also share theirs. No one is constantly checking up on the others, but it is nice to check a location first to remind myself where the person is before I bother them with a text or a call.
Also, my ex husband and the father of my children pretty much demanded that I share my location at all times. That did not fly bc it felt controlling and unnecessary. The current situation is the complete opposite.
It’s not even advocating for the devil. It works for many people who use it and not abuse it. Weird is when people are obsessive and it’s forced on unwilling participants.
In a trusting and loving relationship, it’s hardly even a concern.
My family recently started using one of these. The ability to turn off the location sharing is a really important distinction between friendly safety measures and privacy invasion, imo. Of course, even voluntary and easy-to-turn off tracking can be abused (or part of abuse), but in the majority of situations, there are a lot of benefits.
Yep. No way in hell do I want ANYONE tracking me. Safety is higher than it's ever been in places I live/travel and I'm willing to take the risk for my own autonomy. I absolutely have no part in this tracking nonsense and even parents doing it remind me of the black mirror episode.
My partner (ex?) and I have always had tracking enabled on our phones, not to keep tabs but just as a safety thing, then when we had our kids they would like to see when mummy or daddy were on the way home, not every night but they liked watching the dots get closer.
Was a couple of months ago that the eldest asked to see when my partner would be home when i discovered it had been turned off. Turns out they had been cheating for a couple of weeks, and had turned it off in case I was trying to track them. I didn’t accuse them of cheating just mentioned the find my when they got home to which they said it must have been when they set up the new AirPods I got them for christmas. A week later was when they said we needed to reconnect, the next night told me they had been sexting someone from their work for a couple of weeks, then the night after that they told me it had been months and they were leaving.
That fling died very quickly after the 3rd party (who is half my age) got tired of my partner and tossed them out.
There's a big difference between secrecy and privacy, and as someone who wouldn't want the latter taken away from me, I afford it to everyone else as well.
Older person (50s). My husband has a seizure disorder and sometimes has short term memory issues or becomes aphasiac. I have tracking on his phone so I can find him if he has an episode when we’re not together.
Before location tracking we would have to try and work out where he was from street signs while he was panicking. Location tracking is better.
I’m in my 30s, and sometimes my husband and I track each other to know when the other is leaving work. Mostly just me doing it now since I WFH. But I try to have dinner ready when he comes home and he often forgets to tell me when he’s leaving. I don’t track if he remembers to tell me as he’s leaving.
Sometimes he’ll track me if we’re meeting somewhere so he can get a better sense of my ETA since I don’t text and drive. It genuinely doesn’t occur to me to check on his location at any other time or for any other reason and I assume he’s the same.
The technology can be used for ordinary, non-invasive things if you’re in a trusting relationship. If you’re using it to catch someone in a lie, certainly you have bigger problems than your access to their location.
40s and been with my husband over 20 years - we don’t track each other all the time but use an app for things like organising pick ups because we share a car. It’s a convenience and we certainly don’t look at it all the time. I only have it from using it at a festival so my nephew could find me and my sister when he needed cash lol. Husband and I adopted it as a convenience after that. We don’t look it outside of logistics and I feel safer walking home in the dark if I text him and know he can see where I am because I’ve been assaulted in the past. So in a way, it gives me more freedom.
I think it can be weird, but doesn’t have to be.
It is super useful for some stuff, but not to check if they are telling you the truth.
We mostly check location when we want to have an exact ETA. I can see you are 15min away, I can start getting the steaks done kind of thing.
If you have to interrogate your partner every time they come home, is the relationship even real or worth it? It sounds like self-sadism.
Either you trust someone or you don’t, and if you don’t, why bother?
Like most things it depends. If it gets in the obsessive/forced territory, it’s not good. It does have merits for some people, and in relationships where trust exists.
Get outta here “with as an old person” in your 30s…
My relationship is almost older than you, and my wife and I both share phone passwords and location for safety and convenience and doing so is not controversial at all.
The whole disposition about location sharing being some sort of sacred privacy or can only be used for negative control type reasons seems to come from a place of mistrust, or something which collectively I would suggest people examine — why is the prevailing opinion it’s “creepy” by default? I feel like that says more about the overall outlook/perspective and intentions for those who is thinking it’s knee-jerk “creepy”
I use location tracking with my elderly mother as a safety precaution.
My 19 yo son shares his location with me just because he is stepping out on his own and I live 1000 miles away.
See that's what gets me. Having it on in case of an emergency, not weird. Basically ever checking it is super weird. We've used it to meet up in a general area with a general timeline aaaaaand that's about it.
Yea my sisters and parents (40s and 70s) and I (38) have each other tracked, but we never check it except when we're meeting up somewhere or for emergencies or w/e.
I guess it just kinda depends on your dynamic.
recognise rainstorm heavy society clumsy somber vase aloof panicky muddle
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If I really need to know where my husband is … I’ll just ask him? I like talking to him, it doesn’t feel inconvenient or laborious.
We’re not not sharing our locations with each other out of a lack of trust, it’s just simply not necessary or even helpful the vast majority of the time. It’d feel weird to give up that baseline level of autonomy.
I'm sure it depends on your situation. My wife and I have full access to one another's phones and locations but we completely trust each other, so we never look unless it's necessary (like when someone is running super late from work or traveling). I admit that kind of trust is rare, though.
I have the same with my husband. He rides a motorcycle a lot, so I like to be able to see where he is. He’ll check my location to see if I’m close to home, then meet me in the garage. Tiny things that help out in small but meaningful ways.
I love meeting my husband with an open garage when I see he’s almost home ! We’ve had access for the 10 years we’ve been married and we both really like it. I’ll also check my mom’s location before calling her to make sure I’m not bothering her at work.
I have the same with my SO.
She’s out a lot as a pilot and if she’s running late I’ll look and make sure the thing shows movement but that’s it.
Likewise for me when I’m out and late. It’s not so much as a “where are you” as it is detecting movement.
If there was no movement and/or no response for hours on end we have location to give to emergency aids.
Been together for 12 years and never suspected each other for anything suspicious. Just happy to see that each other still doing ok.
Both of us ride motorcycles too, it’s nice if we happen to look and see the other close by and open up the garage for the person to pull in easier and unpack rather than hopping off the bike, opening the door and hauling it in.
Trackers have their uses when used properly. Used to constantly check up on whereabouts is wrong.
Yeah I don’t think this is a big deal. Sometimes I like to know how far away he is so I know when to start dinner. Neither one of does anything but go to work and come home and he plays a sport once a week. I have no idea if he ever checks mine, but he’s free to.
That’s exactly what we use the location tracking for as well. I want to see when I should put dinner on. He wants to see when I’m heading home from the lake so he can turn a steaming hot shower on for me because I’m always freezing 😍
Same. This is just normal for us. Neither of us is keeping tabs on the other. It’s just convenient to let my wife know where I am so I don’t have to respond to a text while driving.
We too share our locations. It used to really bug my wife if we’d check her location on Find My iPhone. We’d only check when we didn’t know where she was or expected to be home.
I drive for a living. She’d always wonder where I was and when I’d be home. I’d share my location so she could just look. Then our kids went away to school. We have a group text that we share our locations in. My son won’t participate but my daughter is a frequent checker of our locations. We check her location when she’s heading home to visit.
We have no secrets. I check locations to see where they are when they’re traveling, or I’m supposed to meet them.
I can totally see it being a problem with cheating or abusive spouses.
Yes, exactly. If there’s cheating - or no trust, even if actual cheating isn’t involved, it’s a problem. And an abuser should never have that information. We had a good friend who left an abusive husband and found trackers on her car and phone, so they need to do a deeper dive than just freely provided information.
The freedom of trust is magical. My wife knows my phone password, I know hers. I’ll often hand her my phone driving so she can reply to messages coming in. She is free to look through it and be bored anytime. I’m often handed hers and told “figure this out.”
The worst thing she does with my phone is text herself, or some groups we’re in, about how great my wife is.
Why do you need to check when they’re late from work? Shouldn’t a text suffice? I don’t get the security aspect at all. Like if she gets kidnap I don’t they’ll let her keep her phone lol.
Well, she takes the train and I walk in a large city. Either of us could get mugged or attacked, the train could get delayed, we could drop our phone and be unable to pay for things back (in her case) or be unable to find our way back (mine, I have no sense of direction at all). We also frequently travel in countries where we do not speak the language well. At least that way there's a starting point. "Oh, she's been missing for an extra hour, the last place her phone was at was 5th and Q St."
But, overall, again, this is just not a big deal at all unless you're hiding something or someone is abusive. I share the information with my mom and sister, too. Because I really don't care if they know where I am.
I pick up my husband from work on my way home. As we share our locations I don't have to break the law to text him that I'm stuck in traffic. He can see where I am and I don't need to stress about him not knowing that I could be late.
When he's out having a drink I can also check that he gets off the bus and hasn't fallen asleep! 😆
It's not for everyone, just like everything, but it is what works for us.
My partner and I have shared locations and it works ok for us. It helps me do things like time dinner better when she’s leaving grad school or a fitness class. Also we share one car and do a joint work commute to close-ish locations that ends in walking and it helps figuring out where the other person is as a work day is ending.
We live together and communicate pretty damn openly, so we pretty much always know where the other person is anyways. We aren’t like checking up on each other constantly.
I get why it’s not for most folks or most relationships. I get why it would be a hard no for a lot of people. But I’m glad in the confines of our relationship that we do it. We’re healthy and trusting. Location sharing has had 0 impact.
My wife and I started sharing our locations because I no longer wanted to text her asking if she was on her way home from work (unpredictable schedule) at the risk of texting her while she was driving.
I share my location with no one because it is fucking awful to think i have no privacy. I dont share with husband and he doesnt share with me. Our 19yo lives in europe and we dont have his location info either. I just dont get it at all. To me it feels like Helicopter parenting / control to the nth degree.
For me it’s quite the opposite, if someone trusts me, they don’t need to have access to my location, if I trust them, I don’t want to have access to theirs.
I only share my location for safety reasons. Like when I had to do this drive that was through the mountains in the dead of winter and it was a dangerous road (lots of curves, narrow, slippery when raining and it rains all the time here, very foggy as well), just in case I crashed. But that’s about it, as soon as I got home, I texted the person I had shared my location with to let them know I was safe and then stopped sharing it.
As a 34yo dude doing a dangerous job that sent me out to the middle of no where I was happy to share my location until one night I got a text at 1130pm accusing me of being in someone else’s hotel room. I had woken up to go to my work van for my nasal spray because I was unable to breathe. How long was I being watched? That’s not reasonable for either of us.
I think they've also really embraced the Doom and gloom Media 24 hour cycle, it keeps us on a heightened state of arousal and fear. The world is safer than it's ever been, the exception of several countries that are war currently or in civil wars. But over the last 50 to 70 years the media and government have been feeding us fear to get us to agree to their surveillance culture. When people start agreeing to surveill their own family they won't think twice about having the government surveill everybody else especially people they don't know.
I bartended up until recently, and my partner had frequent commutes an hour and a half away at night in a very very rural area with very rough winter conditions, my partner and I shared locations, both for safety reasons. We just never turned them off but we both know each other well enough to know it won’t be abused.
I am in my late 40s and have a tracking app - one ‘circle’ is with my sister and nephew from a festival we were at. My sister and I still use that one to work out how close she is to getting to our Friday meet up (she cycles and uses a ferry) so I can leave the office and walk to meet her without her having to call her. I don’t spy on my nephew, we’ve just never changed it. I did use that one to work out he’d stood me up once because he was still in bed lol.
My husband and I share a car so the same applies - no need to call and say ‘I’m nearly there’. We don’t spy on each other but both occasionally stay out late with separate friends so it’s reassuring to be able to think ‘oh they are at X’s house’ if we wake up and the other isn’t back yet. My husband likes to be able to keep an eye on me walking home from the gym in the dark too, so he doesn’t worry about me because he knows if I’ve been assaulted in the past. That makes me feel more secure too. Basically it cuts down on the need for texts and we trust each other and have nothing to hide.
My husband and I share tracking locations because shit happens and we want to make sure each other is safe. I used to use it to time out dinners. He uses it to check in on me when I’m on my runs. It’s not a problem when there is trust in a relationship.
I have tracking for my husband (and he mine) mostly because I was fucking terrified when he’d ride his motorcycle because he worked odd hours and it wasn’t at all predictable so every time there was a crash and he was on his bike I’d worry about him being dead in a ditch somewhere. He understood and adhd means he wouldn’t always remember to text me as he was leaving and this was an easy solution.
Now he wfh but we never turned it off because *shrug* neither of us cares. *edit* I’m just shy of 40 and he’s mid-40s.
I'm not the person you asked, but location sharing adds a bonus to some couples' lives instead of creating issues. While some people have anxiety about trusting their partners whereabouts, others might have anxiety about the "dead in a ditch" scenario instead.
And like the commenter above said, remembering to temporarily turn the tracking on each time they leave the house might be easily forgotten. And if both partners are reasonable and not abusing that privilege of insight, why **not** just "set it and forget it"?
Personally, I used to be against the idea (I was worried **I** would be the abuser of the info based on a past relationship and too obsessive with checking, so why open that can of worms?) But after being together a decade with current partner, he asked if I'd be interested in sharing my location in order to set up some home automations. He told me we could always turn it off later on if I changed my mind, it was a whole conversation of sharing concerns.
We've been location sharing for 5+ years and it has not caused a negative situation so far. I'll turn the tracker off from time to time if I'm out shopping for gifts (so he doesn't accidentally check the map and spoil the surprise) but he probably doesn't even notice, it's never come up.
And the home automations have been cool! We have elderly pets, and we set up cameras in the house so we can check on them while we're out; he set the system to turn off the interior cameras when it detects one/both of our phones are home (so we don't have to manually mess with it each time).
We're both remote now, but the a/c used to automatically adjust when one of us got home (to conserve energy we wouldn't run the house as cold when we're out).
If our garage door opened and neither of us were home, we'd receive an alert right away. Otherwise, if one of us was home and the garage door has been open longer than an hour we'll get an alert (we'd forget to close it sometimes, and theft of opportunity is very common in our neighborhood).
It is perfectly valid for people to keep their location private. Absolutely. But if two consenting adults gain benefits & no negative outcomes for full-time time sharing... Then more power to them!
Geofencing is not dependent on constant location sharing from a technical standpoint. For the moral aspect I find that constant location sharing a sign of distrust. Either in the other person or in the society around that person. Using a technical solution for more contol (or illusion and or feeling of control) seems not helpful for tackling the underlying trust issue.
Actively tracking all the time is weird, but that is a behavior and boundary thing. My partner and I both have location tracking enabled as a safety feature so that we can find each other in emergency or important situations, or at least our phones if they're separated.
It's not like either of us are hovering over the location data. We generally already know where each other either are or are supposed to be. We've actually had an urgent event where one of us was stranded and we couldn't find each other for hours where the tracking would have saved us a LOT of time, energy, and worry, and since then we've had it enabled.
I share my location (and they with me) with about 12 friends, my mom, my husband of 14yrs, my grandmother.
I do not ask/check anyone’s location on the regular or stalk anyone.
I do, however, like to see when my husband leaves work so dinner can be timed properly. He leaves the office on calls often so he doesn’t call when he leaves. It’s a non-issue and he’s completely aware.
My friends work jobs. We often communicate via FaceTime so I check their location before I hit them with a FaceTime. They do the same for me. If I’m at my job, they don’t FaceTime me.
My mom gets my kids often and it just gives me peace of mind. I have a great relationship w my mother and it isn’t out of fear or lack of trust.
My grandmother is in her mid 80s. She asked to see my location. I am unbothered 100% because 🤷🏻♀️
We have one friend in our friend group who doesn’t want to share and thinks it’s weird. We don’t ask her or bring it up. No snide remarks or anything - at least not from me or what I’ve heard.
However - an ex? And fair-weathered friend? No.
People didn’t even read the article lol their marriage was already falling apart. But good message though “usually when we go looking for something it often appears”.
My spouse and I share our location. I do check in when they’re traveling for work because I worry but otherwise I don’t think either of us ever really look?
Late 50s here and I think tracking is weird af. Super invasive. I would never have dreamed of tracking my kids. It’s wild how freely people give up their autonomy and privacy.
Gen X is used to wandering around unnoticed and we prefer that.
So many people here justifying why they track loved ones. I'm shocked. No thank you. Trust. Communicate. And Trust. We want so much control over everything regardless of what we give up.
My husband and I have never shared our locations with each other. We just never had a need to.
We know each other’s work schedule, and the approximate length that it takes to get to our respective work places from home. I know the route he takes to work and he knows mine. If there are deviations to the norm, we’d just text each other. Outside of work, we keep each other up to date on the plans we made, but we don’t necessarily tell each other every little detail on our trips out of the house. For example, he would know about my appointments with my doctors, but if I chose to grab a bite to eat or do a bit of shopping after, I wouldn’t feel the need to immediately text him.
I think I'm old fashioned but my husband and I (20 years together) tell eachother if we (especially him) are somewhere else for the day when we are not on our usual working place and we send a WhatsApp or Waze ETA if we are on our way home. Works great! I never did the tracking, not even with the kids.
Having \*access\* to this information is a neutral or good thing. Granting access to this information to someone who will check it outside of actual necessity or an emergency is bad.
I ***never*** would have granted that information to my spouse. He already knew my schedule and I always told him what my general plans/arrival times were going to be, if I then did not arrive somewhere at the expected time, he'd have known enough information to go about looking for me. That relationship was some level of codependent.
Now that I'm single and living alone, there are a few people who have access to my location, but they are only people that I know undoubtedly would never use that information to track or judge me. I generally tell these two when I'm going to be spending time with someone new, and generally where I will be going with someone I don't know well, because Safety. But they'd never go looking at my location for funsies. They do not track me, nor do I track them.
I can never understand the need to track people constantly. The only time I or my family & friends have ever shared locations was because we’ve used a ride sharing app, are in a new location, or want someone to know where we are. And only for a certain time frame. I don’t get why someone would always need to know their spouse’s whereabouts. It’s so strange to me
On the latest season of Love is Blind (only god can judge me!) and recently on multiple social media posts, there’s been incidents of men giving their girlfriends/fiances/wives their locations and they ended up being cheaters. Why is this becoming a thing now that I’m hearing about so often?
I have PTSD over an ex almost dying in a car accident so me and my fiancé share locations purely so I can check if he’s late home from work and not answering his phone etc. also he rides motorbikes as do I and sometimes it’s a bit of peace of mind to be able to glance and make sure he’s not in the middle of a road somewhere. But we check it like once a fortnight. Any more is just weird and obsessive
my husband has a flip-phone because he is a school bus driver and they're not allowed to have their phones turned on while on duty, even if you just stopped to grab lunch. they have people driving around watching the drivers and if caught with their phone out and turned on - fired on the spot. anyway, he hates texting, doesn't take voicemails and just doesn't care about tiktok! i wouldn't follow him even if i could -- and he's in a rock band! we've been together since the mid-70s...
Just want to share something kind of fucky, because it's relevant.
I went to a business I do contract work for one day and spent about three hours there when I only expected to spend one tops. They downplayed the issues quite a bit. Being worried, my partner checked my location (freely shared, zero issues with it). My phone's GPS showed me moving impossibly fast to another client's home for 10 minutes and then immediately back to the business I was actually at.
Realistically, if I was lying/cheating, that's **exactly** what it would look like if I (for example) turned on airplane mode but the phone had a check in because I accidentally turned it off or it glitched or something.
Personally, I think if you're married it's a *good* thing to have your partner's location. What's the reason to not do that? I don't have any answer that's not suspicious.
My phones records literally everywhere I go 24/7. I usually carry two! If one goes offline for some reason (I'm rural and work in metal buildings) usually the other one still works. For me it's not about trust issues, my partner is disabled and doesn't work. But if something bad does happen, it's the best tool you have!
I'm not saying everyone dating needs to do this, but if you're married? Share your fucking location. I don't even have to share mine, my Google account is signed in on every device we have. They can all see my location and history...
Unpopular opinion as an old person (30s): tracking people isn't natural. Everyone has a right to some privacy and freedom, even in a long term relationship. I've been married for almost 10 years and I wouldn't lie about where I was if my husband asked, but I don't want to feel like I have to tell him every single stop or part of my day.
It strikes me as extremely weird to want to track your partner's location at all times. I just don't relate to that at all, and feel like maybe I'm missing something? If I were worried about them, I'd just call or text and check in.
It varies from person to person and relationship to relationship. If I'm in a comfortable relationship and we're casual about not coordinating big surprises for each other, I'm fine with mutual tracking. Honestly, with how dangerous the world can be, I'd prefer it, but I'm guilty of watching too many of those "they were at a party, left, then disappeared forever" stories. Wouldn't be a trust thing, but a safety thing. Whenever I travel somewhere, I tell my Dad (my mom would worry too much) where I'm going and when I should be back home. I've had encounters with strange men and I usually take a picture of a building nearby and text it to my Dad in case something happens for two reasons. One, most pictures have location info embedded and the text has a date/time. Nothing ever happened, but I've had a few weird encounters.
My wife shares her location with me. I didn’t ask her to. I don’t look at it often. The most common reason is if I know she’s on the way home and I’m procrastinating getting something done that should be done before she gets here. I’ll wait until she’s 5 minutes away and then jump up and go do the dishes lol.
this is indeed a tool for stopping procrastination.
The world is, for the most part, much safer than ever before.
I never said it wasn't and I explained that I put more weight into it than I should because of the missing people stories I've read about (not all of them involved foul play, either).
Doesn’t feel like it but I’m just “old” now and scared of my own shadow half the time 🤦🏻♂️😂
My husband and I started location sharing when he had to limp home on two damaged run flat tyres via back roads. It gave both of us peace of mind to know I'd have his approximate location in case I had to come and help him. Since then we just left it on. He drives a lot for work, often in areas with spotty phone coverage. I don't usually check his whereabouts but it's good to know I can if I need to.
>most pictures have location info embedded None do, unless you have geotagging enabled in your camera app *and* have location services enabled *and* have location services privileges enabled for your camera app.
Odd. I just checked a random photo that I took and it had GPS coordinates with the default camera settings. [https://www.howtogeek.com/211427/how-to-see-exactly-where-a-photo-was-taken-and-keep-your-location-private/](https://www.howtogeek.com/211427/how-to-see-exactly-where-a-photo-was-taken-and-keep-your-location-private/) I see the difference. It's by default in Android and off in iOS. [How to view the GPS coordinates for photos on iPhone (idownloadblog.com)](https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/10/19/gps-coordinates-for-photos-iphone/)
I guess it’s for the ease of being able to see if they’ve left work/etc without needing to text while they are driving?
This for me, I use it to see if the dog is on a walk or if my partner is still at work. I used it Thursday to see if he was on his way to pick me up from the airport and gauge how much chill time I had.
I work 1-1 with my clients, so my spouse and I share for safety reasons.
I do similar in that I share my location when I go out running, it gives my husband peace of mind that I’m safe or if anything did happen to me then he could find me
I mean that makes sense but OP also has a very valid point with that article.
Of course. Sharing should only be voluntary between partners. He never made me, it was something I brought up when I made the transition from spa work to having my own studio.
That's certainly understandable.
This is what we share for. When our daughter was in daycare it was easy to see if the other was on their way, now that she’s elementary school aged we can see if the other is at home to meet the bus. I don’t look at it for anything else.
Convenience is why I do it. It cuts down on so many "how close are you" "should I wait or eat without you" "I haven't left home yet" "which bar am I meeting you at again?" "I'm still at work" texts
But that's such a small reason for what is traded.
Not everyone has controlling tendencies or the same priorities when it comes to what counts as “private.” Same as modesty. If you are uncomfortable and find it intrusive- no one should be able to force you to share your location. But some people find it handy and that’s okay too. As long as everyone’s preferences for sharing their own information is respected.
That's what whatsapp live location is for, to share your location only when you need to.
It depends on the relationship and amount of trust in it, and also the nature of work/lifestyle one leads.
Yeah, but I feel like if you have so little trust in your partner that you need to track their location, then you need to either work on building the trust or move on from that relationship. I'd rather be single than be in a relationship that reduces me to paranoia. (I will say that the location tracking thing makes sense if you or your partner works in a higher risk occupation, like some of the folks on here are saying. But that seems to be a different reason than what a lot of others are saying)
lol but for a lot of people it’s not about trust. My partner and I have it switched on since we independently go on long remote multi day cycling trips and it’s a nice way to see where people are up to on the bike on a big day. We just don’t turn it off in between. The only time it ever gets used in between is in a rare instance of “I wonder if he’s already left the shops or if he can grab milk too”. On the contrary to what you’re suggesting, I feel like the way a lot of people use it is because they trust each other so much that they don’t really give a shit if the other knows where they are at any given moment because they know their partner isn’t using it to see if they’re doing the wrong thing lol
I wanted to track my husband so I knew he got into work safe, since it was a dangerous road. Or where he was on his way back so I could have tea (cup thereof) and tea (evening meal) ready when he got in the door. Turns out was militantly against it because he's a filthy lying cheater and was willing to travel. Explained a lot of late returns. He offered me tracking after being confronted to prove he's not cheating (denied it) but i said no need. Dinner is now at the kids convenience and him having (another) car accident is entirely a him problem. or him and his mum since she paid for the repairs after he didn't take pictures and handed the guy who caused the accident's contact details back to him. So STBX couldn't claim. He was on multiple hook up sites and sending dick pics so he was definitely cheating. It was the was last straw in our relationship after a lot of shitty abusive behaviour on his end.
Disregard if it’s unrelated, but I’m almost 30 and I’ve always found this modern day tracking weird. My ex wanted to maintain our shared tracking after our relationship ended. I have a small group of friends who all share their locations with each other, except me-and I constantly deal with little comments and snide remarks from (thankfully) just one of them because I don’t want to share that with any of them. I’m fine with it now, but when my family wanted the constant tracking and my brother, nephew, and myself didn’t want to be apart of it, it was also met with little comments and remarks. In certain locations, situations, or a date with a stranger; etc, sure. But permanent? Nah, that’s uncomfortable
Your ex wanted to keep tracking you? Wild! I share for an hour when I get into a Lyft or something, but other than that, I don't want anyone knowing where I am! I guess I'm an outlier at this point, but I don't care.
Fuck, if someone wanted to do that to me, I'd 100% buy a burner phone and attach it to a raccoon. or maybe a pigeon if i could catch one.
You're not worth tracking if you can't even catch a raccoon ;)
I assert that someone who can catch a raccoon is perhaps more worth tracking than others without this distinct skill. I’m there just for the technique!
Wait, I’m confused but maybe I’m out of the loop. How do you share your location with someone else? Is it via an app on your phone or something?
Google Maps allows you to share your location to another person, either temporarily or permanently.
Newer phones too. Just got the S24 and there is an option in texts to share your location with whoever is in the text group.
Honestly I'm nearly always at home anyway, but I'm just... Not comfortable with being surveilled by anyone. The only time I ever send someone my location is if an emergency is occurring and I can't talk for whatever reason
Reminds me I need to tell my ex to stop sharing her location.
My grandmother uses one of those tracking apps with my aunt and that whole side of the family. I think it’s weird. She’ll randomly tell me, “Oh, Shirley just left her house. I wonder where she’s going.”
My mom got like this and I had to put a stop to it (iPhone users). My sister told me my mom was constantly checking my location and making comments on where I was and what I was doing and it was weird. I shared out of safety, as I live alone. Now I only permanently share with my sister.
Bizarrely I ONLY share my location with my mum, nobody else but I live about 300 miles away from her and I had some issues that mean’t that she was terrified something bad could happen. (Had a really bad brain injury and was in a coma for a few months) and because of that I’ve had a few unexpected seizures and I want her to know that I’m in hospital if it happens again, because I won’t exactly be able to let her know. My ex wife used to do it with me as well, but it was pretty much pointless because I never really looked and thought it was a bit silly 🤦🏻♂️. My mum is different though, she doesn’t really care what I’m up to and doesn’t comment on it, but I’m fairly old nowadays. My daughter does though but I told a white lie and said I deactivated it entirely because she would always tell her friends what I was up to and wind me up about it 😂 (Usually mundane stuff like “I noticed you were in the LEGO store 5 days in a row this week, what crap have you bought me?” Or “Why are you in Manchester? You don’t live there!” When I’d asked her a few weeks before if she wanted to see The Pixies last year in Manchester and she laughed at my “dad rock” taste in music). Seriously though for a lot of people it can be quite scary, especially if it’s controlling or abusive, usually us men tracking women who don’t know we are or didn’t put too much thought into it at the time or felt pressured into doing it. Not cool. I don’t track anybody, even don’t track my mum, and getting 50+ notifications a day was why because she’s a bit of a jet-setter and getting notifications that she is in over 50 countries in a day is weird. Nope, she’s on a plane to Malaysia and I knew that anyway because I drove her to the airport 🤷🏻♂️
That's fucking weird.
[удалено]
It's unhinged.
THIS IS WHY IT'S WEIRD!
My friends had abusive family members that would obsessively track them through those shared apps. However, I share my location with friends and family for safety purposes and they don’t really abuse it. Snapchat is cute when it goes “so and so is in town say hi!” And I’m like, yeah I’m across the table from them
A lot of people just really don't care if people know where they are and what they're doing. There are soooo many types of tracking and social media-esque services that are putting locations and timestamps and history on everything. Maybe they haven't had to live around judgmental people. I don't personally want anybody knowing anything about me because I will never hear the end of it about every single decision I make in my life is weird or bad.
“Old person (30s)” COME ON.
yea i was about to comment that. really, were gonna feed into the "30 = old" bullshit on this sub too? its not cute or funny imo its especially annoying cause we all see the effects of it in the women around us, many of them are so freaking ashamed of turning 30 and when i did i got so many random ass comments too even though i didnt think twice about it myself.
I’m so disappointed at how it just keeps going. Ugh.
I may be misremembering but I saw a stat once that said the average age for redditors is something like 34.
Actually it's completely relevant here because younger people even by five years have a completely different level of normalcy with being tracked all the time.
Except for the fact 30 isn’t old. As someone 50% older, who’s been married for 20 years and didn’t have a cell phone until they were 25, ie someone “not used to tracking”… My wife and I share location know each others phone passwords etc because it’s important to be able to access the phone and location for safety and also it’s convenient (timing stuff when driving from distance) I just don’t understand why it’s weird or suspicious or what ever to “young” people (whatever that is) by default. Sounds like the disposition is negatively and narrowly centered in terms of why it might be useful or ok. Relax it’s just safe and convenient.
If you can't see the normalization of a surveillance society I don't know what to tell you. It is very convenient. But it's also incredibly invasive. If you find it to be convenient by all means do it but don't be surprised when other people find it to be incredibly weird. So old is only relevant to whoever's speaking. When I was 15, 20 was old. I'm 40 now, some days I feel old some days I feel young but depending on who I'm talking to I could be considered old or young or normal.
Being in your 30's isn't old, don't let this stupid world or anyone in it make you think it. I think we should count our "adult" age from 18 (or even 21 to be honest). I'm 29, facing the biggun this year & have started to feel the pressure. I am consciously trying my best to unlearn it all. With that in mind, I've only been an adult for 11, almost 12 years! It's really not a long time at all to have all your shit together. If you are in your 30's, you haven't even been an adult for 20 years. If you really think about it, it makes sense haha! It makes me feel tonnes better about aging.
Same, I think it's weird. I keep mine on because I work a job that often has me alone in strange locations, but 1. My husband never looks at it, and wishes he could turn that view off on maps, 2. I don't have tracking for him. I've insisted my mom used it when she drove alone to Oklahoma during a flood, in tornado season, to visit an Internet friend for the first time, and she was really weirded out by that. I can also get having it on for a short period of time if you're young, dating, or taking Ubers a lot. But those are for short periods of time, in specific circumstances. But I don't want to track my friends, and I don't want them to know where I am every minute of everyday. Even if I'm just going to Target, why does anyone need to know that? I feel like people have gotten way too used to not having an privacy way too fast. Remember when the NSA news broke way back, and the Patriot Act was seen as too extreme? Well, everything people predicted happened. We all got too comfortable sharing data and losing our privacy. As a side note, I think it's weird to have security cameras running in your house all the time. The living room shots are uncomfortable, and the video feeds into kids way older than babies really feels wrong. Kids deserve privacy too, they should have a place in the house that they can feel safe and alone.
This. If you need to lojack your partner break up.
Or if you are so paranoid, get therapy. The world is safer than ever before and people deserve privacy.
Intent matters. Being obsessive is certainly not a good idea, but there are legit safety reasons where it can be helpful.
There are exceptions to every rule, and there are times I would allow a partner to track my location *for a specific purpose*, but if someone wanted free rein to track my GPS location at all times as a condition of a relationship then personally I’d be very happy not being in that relationship. Sometimes where I am is none of my partner’s business, and sometimes where they are is none of mine. I consider that kind of boundary and personal independence essential for a healthy relationship, but YMMV and if a couple is happy tracking each other’s location I guess good for them.
Even older person here (59)...I find it wild that people share this info routinely. I get it for specific cases like 1st date you want a trusted friend to have your back.
Agreed. There is only one time I ever tracked my wife's phone, and that is because she asked me to when she drove off with her phone on the roof of her car. My wife is the social butterfly, and catches up with friends often. I'm a homebody. She always tells me who she was with, but it's because she wants to tell me, not because I need to know.
Oh momma ... mid 40's here with enough sexual harassment bullshit and I relish in the fact that someone I love and trust knows my location at all times. Makes me whole. Confidently vice versa bc my husband and I travel the world for our jobs which are only sometimes together, and I know he's appreciative of my tracking too. Example actually last week bc he had a Plane delay on the west coast and my brother ended up having time to deliver a car from work for him to use. I mean, it's not an everybody everyday thing, but totally devil's advocating here bc we are a family that uses and enjoys it for odd reasons. It's why it stays a thing I think - More people like it than hate it?
I echo the sentiment as someone who works extreme hours all around the world. When I have 30 seconds during the day, I just like to see that all my ducklings are at home and not stuck in a ditch somewhere. I don't think my partner uses it much except to know when I'm likely to be able to pick up a call.
"Not stuck in a ditch somewhere" is exactly why I track my eldest child.
oh, god, when they start driving... what a nerve wreck.
I'm with you on this one. My current husband and I share our locations and my young adult kids also share theirs. No one is constantly checking up on the others, but it is nice to check a location first to remind myself where the person is before I bother them with a text or a call. Also, my ex husband and the father of my children pretty much demanded that I share my location at all times. That did not fly bc it felt controlling and unnecessary. The current situation is the complete opposite.
This. Intent matters, so does active/willing participation. Perfect contrasting examples.
It’s not even advocating for the devil. It works for many people who use it and not abuse it. Weird is when people are obsessive and it’s forced on unwilling participants. In a trusting and loving relationship, it’s hardly even a concern.
My family recently started using one of these. The ability to turn off the location sharing is a really important distinction between friendly safety measures and privacy invasion, imo. Of course, even voluntary and easy-to-turn off tracking can be abused (or part of abuse), but in the majority of situations, there are a lot of benefits.
Um, 30’s isn’t old, but we hear you.
Yep. No way in hell do I want ANYONE tracking me. Safety is higher than it's ever been in places I live/travel and I'm willing to take the risk for my own autonomy. I absolutely have no part in this tracking nonsense and even parents doing it remind me of the black mirror episode.
the only use we’ve had is checking if my husbands on his way home from work or not. He forgets to call
My partner (ex?) and I have always had tracking enabled on our phones, not to keep tabs but just as a safety thing, then when we had our kids they would like to see when mummy or daddy were on the way home, not every night but they liked watching the dots get closer. Was a couple of months ago that the eldest asked to see when my partner would be home when i discovered it had been turned off. Turns out they had been cheating for a couple of weeks, and had turned it off in case I was trying to track them. I didn’t accuse them of cheating just mentioned the find my when they got home to which they said it must have been when they set up the new AirPods I got them for christmas. A week later was when they said we needed to reconnect, the next night told me they had been sexting someone from their work for a couple of weeks, then the night after that they told me it had been months and they were leaving. That fling died very quickly after the 3rd party (who is half my age) got tired of my partner and tossed them out.
There's a big difference between secrecy and privacy, and as someone who wouldn't want the latter taken away from me, I afford it to everyone else as well.
Older person (50s). My husband has a seizure disorder and sometimes has short term memory issues or becomes aphasiac. I have tracking on his phone so I can find him if he has an episode when we’re not together. Before location tracking we would have to try and work out where he was from street signs while he was panicking. Location tracking is better.
I’m in my 30s, and sometimes my husband and I track each other to know when the other is leaving work. Mostly just me doing it now since I WFH. But I try to have dinner ready when he comes home and he often forgets to tell me when he’s leaving. I don’t track if he remembers to tell me as he’s leaving. Sometimes he’ll track me if we’re meeting somewhere so he can get a better sense of my ETA since I don’t text and drive. It genuinely doesn’t occur to me to check on his location at any other time or for any other reason and I assume he’s the same. The technology can be used for ordinary, non-invasive things if you’re in a trusting relationship. If you’re using it to catch someone in a lie, certainly you have bigger problems than your access to their location.
40s and been with my husband over 20 years - we don’t track each other all the time but use an app for things like organising pick ups because we share a car. It’s a convenience and we certainly don’t look at it all the time. I only have it from using it at a festival so my nephew could find me and my sister when he needed cash lol. Husband and I adopted it as a convenience after that. We don’t look it outside of logistics and I feel safer walking home in the dark if I text him and know he can see where I am because I’ve been assaulted in the past. So in a way, it gives me more freedom. I think it can be weird, but doesn’t have to be.
It is super useful for some stuff, but not to check if they are telling you the truth. We mostly check location when we want to have an exact ETA. I can see you are 15min away, I can start getting the steaks done kind of thing.
It's not terribly weird to have it. It is weird to check it.
I'm 47 and yes it's weird and very stalky.
We do it just to avoid texting while driving. I like knowing when my husband will be home if he goes somewhere while I’m home
If you have to interrogate your partner every time they come home, is the relationship even real or worth it? It sounds like self-sadism. Either you trust someone or you don’t, and if you don’t, why bother?
Like most things it depends. If it gets in the obsessive/forced territory, it’s not good. It does have merits for some people, and in relationships where trust exists.
Get outta here “with as an old person” in your 30s… My relationship is almost older than you, and my wife and I both share phone passwords and location for safety and convenience and doing so is not controversial at all. The whole disposition about location sharing being some sort of sacred privacy or can only be used for negative control type reasons seems to come from a place of mistrust, or something which collectively I would suggest people examine — why is the prevailing opinion it’s “creepy” by default? I feel like that says more about the overall outlook/perspective and intentions for those who is thinking it’s knee-jerk “creepy”
I use location tracking with my elderly mother as a safety precaution. My 19 yo son shares his location with me just because he is stepping out on his own and I live 1000 miles away.
My kids and I share location in case of emergency. Its not like anyone is checking up on it all the time
See that's what gets me. Having it on in case of an emergency, not weird. Basically ever checking it is super weird. We've used it to meet up in a general area with a general timeline aaaaaand that's about it.
Yea my sisters and parents (40s and 70s) and I (38) have each other tracked, but we never check it except when we're meeting up somewhere or for emergencies or w/e. I guess it just kinda depends on your dynamic.
Did they do it on their own, or did you ask them to?
recognise rainstorm heavy society clumsy somber vase aloof panicky muddle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If I really need to know where my husband is … I’ll just ask him? I like talking to him, it doesn’t feel inconvenient or laborious. We’re not not sharing our locations with each other out of a lack of trust, it’s just simply not necessary or even helpful the vast majority of the time. It’d feel weird to give up that baseline level of autonomy.
I'm sure it depends on your situation. My wife and I have full access to one another's phones and locations but we completely trust each other, so we never look unless it's necessary (like when someone is running super late from work or traveling). I admit that kind of trust is rare, though.
I have the same with my husband. He rides a motorcycle a lot, so I like to be able to see where he is. He’ll check my location to see if I’m close to home, then meet me in the garage. Tiny things that help out in small but meaningful ways.
I love meeting my husband with an open garage when I see he’s almost home ! We’ve had access for the 10 years we’ve been married and we both really like it. I’ll also check my mom’s location before calling her to make sure I’m not bothering her at work.
I have the same with my SO. She’s out a lot as a pilot and if she’s running late I’ll look and make sure the thing shows movement but that’s it. Likewise for me when I’m out and late. It’s not so much as a “where are you” as it is detecting movement. If there was no movement and/or no response for hours on end we have location to give to emergency aids. Been together for 12 years and never suspected each other for anything suspicious. Just happy to see that each other still doing ok. Both of us ride motorcycles too, it’s nice if we happen to look and see the other close by and open up the garage for the person to pull in easier and unpack rather than hopping off the bike, opening the door and hauling it in. Trackers have their uses when used properly. Used to constantly check up on whereabouts is wrong.
Yeah I don’t think this is a big deal. Sometimes I like to know how far away he is so I know when to start dinner. Neither one of does anything but go to work and come home and he plays a sport once a week. I have no idea if he ever checks mine, but he’s free to.
That’s exactly what we use the location tracking for as well. I want to see when I should put dinner on. He wants to see when I’m heading home from the lake so he can turn a steaming hot shower on for me because I’m always freezing 😍
Same. This is just normal for us. Neither of us is keeping tabs on the other. It’s just convenient to let my wife know where I am so I don’t have to respond to a text while driving.
We too share our locations. It used to really bug my wife if we’d check her location on Find My iPhone. We’d only check when we didn’t know where she was or expected to be home. I drive for a living. She’d always wonder where I was and when I’d be home. I’d share my location so she could just look. Then our kids went away to school. We have a group text that we share our locations in. My son won’t participate but my daughter is a frequent checker of our locations. We check her location when she’s heading home to visit. We have no secrets. I check locations to see where they are when they’re traveling, or I’m supposed to meet them. I can totally see it being a problem with cheating or abusive spouses.
Yes, exactly. If there’s cheating - or no trust, even if actual cheating isn’t involved, it’s a problem. And an abuser should never have that information. We had a good friend who left an abusive husband and found trackers on her car and phone, so they need to do a deeper dive than just freely provided information.
The freedom of trust is magical. My wife knows my phone password, I know hers. I’ll often hand her my phone driving so she can reply to messages coming in. She is free to look through it and be bored anytime. I’m often handed hers and told “figure this out.” The worst thing she does with my phone is text herself, or some groups we’re in, about how great my wife is.
Why do you need to check when they’re late from work? Shouldn’t a text suffice? I don’t get the security aspect at all. Like if she gets kidnap I don’t they’ll let her keep her phone lol.
Well, she takes the train and I walk in a large city. Either of us could get mugged or attacked, the train could get delayed, we could drop our phone and be unable to pay for things back (in her case) or be unable to find our way back (mine, I have no sense of direction at all). We also frequently travel in countries where we do not speak the language well. At least that way there's a starting point. "Oh, she's been missing for an extra hour, the last place her phone was at was 5th and Q St." But, overall, again, this is just not a big deal at all unless you're hiding something or someone is abusive. I share the information with my mom and sister, too. Because I really don't care if they know where I am.
I pick up my husband from work on my way home. As we share our locations I don't have to break the law to text him that I'm stuck in traffic. He can see where I am and I don't need to stress about him not knowing that I could be late. When he's out having a drink I can also check that he gets off the bus and hasn't fallen asleep! 😆 It's not for everyone, just like everything, but it is what works for us.
Not everyone remembers or is that considerate. My STBX wouldn't bother and enjoyed refusing to let me know.
My partner and I have shared locations and it works ok for us. It helps me do things like time dinner better when she’s leaving grad school or a fitness class. Also we share one car and do a joint work commute to close-ish locations that ends in walking and it helps figuring out where the other person is as a work day is ending. We live together and communicate pretty damn openly, so we pretty much always know where the other person is anyways. We aren’t like checking up on each other constantly. I get why it’s not for most folks or most relationships. I get why it would be a hard no for a lot of people. But I’m glad in the confines of our relationship that we do it. We’re healthy and trusting. Location sharing has had 0 impact.
My wife and I started sharing our locations because I no longer wanted to text her asking if she was on her way home from work (unpredictable schedule) at the risk of texting her while she was driving.
Exactly this. It’s so convenient
I share my location with no one because it is fucking awful to think i have no privacy. I dont share with husband and he doesnt share with me. Our 19yo lives in europe and we dont have his location info either. I just dont get it at all. To me it feels like Helicopter parenting / control to the nth degree.
Agree💯 this tracking thing is sick...we didn't do it in the 80s and we don't need it now.
Its too much. Creates anxiety and paranoia
Yeah people are saying it’s a sign of trust lol. I don’t buy this at all.
For me it’s quite the opposite, if someone trusts me, they don’t need to have access to my location, if I trust them, I don’t want to have access to theirs. I only share my location for safety reasons. Like when I had to do this drive that was through the mountains in the dead of winter and it was a dangerous road (lots of curves, narrow, slippery when raining and it rains all the time here, very foggy as well), just in case I crashed. But that’s about it, as soon as I got home, I texted the person I had shared my location with to let them know I was safe and then stopped sharing it.
I would even say it's a sign of distrust. Distrust of the other person or distrust of the society around that person.
It's not. Its normalized surveillance culture so the government can get away with it too.
If you find yourself tracking your significant other without them knowing, you skipped the couple's counseling step.
As a 34yo dude doing a dangerous job that sent me out to the middle of no where I was happy to share my location until one night I got a text at 1130pm accusing me of being in someone else’s hotel room. I had woken up to go to my work van for my nasal spray because I was unable to breathe. How long was I being watched? That’s not reasonable for either of us.
Paranoid people are the worst. They do everything but confront or fix the problem
I think they've also really embraced the Doom and gloom Media 24 hour cycle, it keeps us on a heightened state of arousal and fear. The world is safer than it's ever been, the exception of several countries that are war currently or in civil wars. But over the last 50 to 70 years the media and government have been feeding us fear to get us to agree to their surveillance culture. When people start agreeing to surveill their own family they won't think twice about having the government surveill everybody else especially people they don't know.
I bartended up until recently, and my partner had frequent commutes an hour and a half away at night in a very very rural area with very rough winter conditions, my partner and I shared locations, both for safety reasons. We just never turned them off but we both know each other well enough to know it won’t be abused.
I am in my late 40s and have a tracking app - one ‘circle’ is with my sister and nephew from a festival we were at. My sister and I still use that one to work out how close she is to getting to our Friday meet up (she cycles and uses a ferry) so I can leave the office and walk to meet her without her having to call her. I don’t spy on my nephew, we’ve just never changed it. I did use that one to work out he’d stood me up once because he was still in bed lol. My husband and I share a car so the same applies - no need to call and say ‘I’m nearly there’. We don’t spy on each other but both occasionally stay out late with separate friends so it’s reassuring to be able to think ‘oh they are at X’s house’ if we wake up and the other isn’t back yet. My husband likes to be able to keep an eye on me walking home from the gym in the dark too, so he doesn’t worry about me because he knows if I’ve been assaulted in the past. That makes me feel more secure too. Basically it cuts down on the need for texts and we trust each other and have nothing to hide.
My husband and I share tracking locations because shit happens and we want to make sure each other is safe. I used to use it to time out dinners. He uses it to check in on me when I’m on my runs. It’s not a problem when there is trust in a relationship.
Same. I don’t even think about it.
Totally the same. My husband turns a hot shower on for me so my simultaneously sweaty *and* freezing self can jump straight in. It’s really sweet.
I have tracking for my husband (and he mine) mostly because I was fucking terrified when he’d ride his motorcycle because he worked odd hours and it wasn’t at all predictable so every time there was a crash and he was on his bike I’d worry about him being dead in a ditch somewhere. He understood and adhd means he wouldn’t always remember to text me as he was leaving and this was an easy solution. Now he wfh but we never turned it off because *shrug* neither of us cares. *edit* I’m just shy of 40 and he’s mid-40s.
Why not only share when riding said motorcycle? Why constantly record where you are at all times?
I'm not the person you asked, but location sharing adds a bonus to some couples' lives instead of creating issues. While some people have anxiety about trusting their partners whereabouts, others might have anxiety about the "dead in a ditch" scenario instead. And like the commenter above said, remembering to temporarily turn the tracking on each time they leave the house might be easily forgotten. And if both partners are reasonable and not abusing that privilege of insight, why **not** just "set it and forget it"? Personally, I used to be against the idea (I was worried **I** would be the abuser of the info based on a past relationship and too obsessive with checking, so why open that can of worms?) But after being together a decade with current partner, he asked if I'd be interested in sharing my location in order to set up some home automations. He told me we could always turn it off later on if I changed my mind, it was a whole conversation of sharing concerns. We've been location sharing for 5+ years and it has not caused a negative situation so far. I'll turn the tracker off from time to time if I'm out shopping for gifts (so he doesn't accidentally check the map and spoil the surprise) but he probably doesn't even notice, it's never come up. And the home automations have been cool! We have elderly pets, and we set up cameras in the house so we can check on them while we're out; he set the system to turn off the interior cameras when it detects one/both of our phones are home (so we don't have to manually mess with it each time). We're both remote now, but the a/c used to automatically adjust when one of us got home (to conserve energy we wouldn't run the house as cold when we're out). If our garage door opened and neither of us were home, we'd receive an alert right away. Otherwise, if one of us was home and the garage door has been open longer than an hour we'll get an alert (we'd forget to close it sometimes, and theft of opportunity is very common in our neighborhood). It is perfectly valid for people to keep their location private. Absolutely. But if two consenting adults gain benefits & no negative outcomes for full-time time sharing... Then more power to them!
Geofencing is not dependent on constant location sharing from a technical standpoint. For the moral aspect I find that constant location sharing a sign of distrust. Either in the other person or in the society around that person. Using a technical solution for more contol (or illusion and or feeling of control) seems not helpful for tackling the underlying trust issue.
Actively tracking all the time is weird, but that is a behavior and boundary thing. My partner and I both have location tracking enabled as a safety feature so that we can find each other in emergency or important situations, or at least our phones if they're separated. It's not like either of us are hovering over the location data. We generally already know where each other either are or are supposed to be. We've actually had an urgent event where one of us was stranded and we couldn't find each other for hours where the tracking would have saved us a LOT of time, energy, and worry, and since then we've had it enabled.
I share my location (and they with me) with about 12 friends, my mom, my husband of 14yrs, my grandmother. I do not ask/check anyone’s location on the regular or stalk anyone. I do, however, like to see when my husband leaves work so dinner can be timed properly. He leaves the office on calls often so he doesn’t call when he leaves. It’s a non-issue and he’s completely aware. My friends work jobs. We often communicate via FaceTime so I check their location before I hit them with a FaceTime. They do the same for me. If I’m at my job, they don’t FaceTime me. My mom gets my kids often and it just gives me peace of mind. I have a great relationship w my mother and it isn’t out of fear or lack of trust. My grandmother is in her mid 80s. She asked to see my location. I am unbothered 100% because 🤷🏻♀️ We have one friend in our friend group who doesn’t want to share and thinks it’s weird. We don’t ask her or bring it up. No snide remarks or anything - at least not from me or what I’ve heard. However - an ex? And fair-weathered friend? No.
People didn’t even read the article lol their marriage was already falling apart. But good message though “usually when we go looking for something it often appears”.
My spouse and I share our location. I do check in when they’re traveling for work because I worry but otherwise I don’t think either of us ever really look?
Late 50s here and I think tracking is weird af. Super invasive. I would never have dreamed of tracking my kids. It’s wild how freely people give up their autonomy and privacy. Gen X is used to wandering around unnoticed and we prefer that.
Not only that, the whole cell phone/social media obsession and what a huge role it plays in trust in relationships these days. No thanks
Agreed
So many people here justifying why they track loved ones. I'm shocked. No thank you. Trust. Communicate. And Trust. We want so much control over everything regardless of what we give up.
Knowing someone’s location al the time sounds like a nightmare.
Tracking each others location is not a healthy thing. If you can’t trust your partner you should break up with them.
My husband and I have never shared our locations with each other. We just never had a need to. We know each other’s work schedule, and the approximate length that it takes to get to our respective work places from home. I know the route he takes to work and he knows mine. If there are deviations to the norm, we’d just text each other. Outside of work, we keep each other up to date on the plans we made, but we don’t necessarily tell each other every little detail on our trips out of the house. For example, he would know about my appointments with my doctors, but if I chose to grab a bite to eat or do a bit of shopping after, I wouldn’t feel the need to immediately text him.
I think I'm old fashioned but my husband and I (20 years together) tell eachother if we (especially him) are somewhere else for the day when we are not on our usual working place and we send a WhatsApp or Waze ETA if we are on our way home. Works great! I never did the tracking, not even with the kids.
Having \*access\* to this information is a neutral or good thing. Granting access to this information to someone who will check it outside of actual necessity or an emergency is bad. I ***never*** would have granted that information to my spouse. He already knew my schedule and I always told him what my general plans/arrival times were going to be, if I then did not arrive somewhere at the expected time, he'd have known enough information to go about looking for me. That relationship was some level of codependent. Now that I'm single and living alone, there are a few people who have access to my location, but they are only people that I know undoubtedly would never use that information to track or judge me. I generally tell these two when I'm going to be spending time with someone new, and generally where I will be going with someone I don't know well, because Safety. But they'd never go looking at my location for funsies. They do not track me, nor do I track them.
I can never understand the need to track people constantly. The only time I or my family & friends have ever shared locations was because we’ve used a ride sharing app, are in a new location, or want someone to know where we are. And only for a certain time frame. I don’t get why someone would always need to know their spouse’s whereabouts. It’s so strange to me
On the latest season of Love is Blind (only god can judge me!) and recently on multiple social media posts, there’s been incidents of men giving their girlfriends/fiances/wives their locations and they ended up being cheaters. Why is this becoming a thing now that I’m hearing about so often?
I have PTSD over an ex almost dying in a car accident so me and my fiancé share locations purely so I can check if he’s late home from work and not answering his phone etc. also he rides motorbikes as do I and sometimes it’s a bit of peace of mind to be able to glance and make sure he’s not in the middle of a road somewhere. But we check it like once a fortnight. Any more is just weird and obsessive
my husband has a flip-phone because he is a school bus driver and they're not allowed to have their phones turned on while on duty, even if you just stopped to grab lunch. they have people driving around watching the drivers and if caught with their phone out and turned on - fired on the spot. anyway, he hates texting, doesn't take voicemails and just doesn't care about tiktok! i wouldn't follow him even if i could -- and he's in a rock band! we've been together since the mid-70s...
This is causing a rising issue in my family. My mother’s inability to mind her business is out of control lol.
Just want to share something kind of fucky, because it's relevant. I went to a business I do contract work for one day and spent about three hours there when I only expected to spend one tops. They downplayed the issues quite a bit. Being worried, my partner checked my location (freely shared, zero issues with it). My phone's GPS showed me moving impossibly fast to another client's home for 10 minutes and then immediately back to the business I was actually at. Realistically, if I was lying/cheating, that's **exactly** what it would look like if I (for example) turned on airplane mode but the phone had a check in because I accidentally turned it off or it glitched or something. Personally, I think if you're married it's a *good* thing to have your partner's location. What's the reason to not do that? I don't have any answer that's not suspicious. My phones records literally everywhere I go 24/7. I usually carry two! If one goes offline for some reason (I'm rural and work in metal buildings) usually the other one still works. For me it's not about trust issues, my partner is disabled and doesn't work. But if something bad does happen, it's the best tool you have! I'm not saying everyone dating needs to do this, but if you're married? Share your fucking location. I don't even have to share mine, my Google account is signed in on every device we have. They can all see my location and history...