Technology

Safety concerns aside, you should trust your partner enough to not need to track them

If you can't trust your spouse without location, tracking, find another spouse.

Of all the dystopian things, this is probably the most dystopian thing I’ve read lately.

This is horrible.

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

Isn’t it strange that “trusting” someone now, means letting them constantly spy on you?

I talked to some late teens about it some months ago. They see it as an “I give you permission to see my every move” kind of thing, as in they have nothing to hide. And they do it pretty early on in relationships, as a show of commitment.

I got my SO to turn off location tracking on Snapchat because I got a message from a family member about his location. She had screenshotted his location from the snap map, searched the address, found the person living there, searched him up, found out he’s also gay, and wondered if I knew he was out with another man?! FYI we attended a dinner party at the guys home.

That’s the level of insane some people get. Constant surveillance, mixed with insecurities and stories of cheating, and you’ve got a shitty ass cocktail.

Me having location shared with my partner of 20 years is one thing. But sharing it with anyone else? Fuck no.

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.

If you sacrifice freedom for security, then you deserve neither.

If this was demanded of me, I would end the relationship immediately. That's absolutely not worth it.

If your partner cant trust you not to cheat then work on your relasionship or end it. Dont do this shit.

I can’t believe the number of people in here with paranoia and shitty relationships that can’t communicate with their “partner”

"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.

I don't want to share my location nor have anyone else's shared with me.

Friends and partners can text "I'll be there in 5"

My friend shares her location with her mother. Her mother then nags her with like "Are you seeing someone new? You're spending a lot of time in north brooklyn now." Like, who needs that, or even the temptation of that?

A tech solution is not going to fix a social/mental problem like fear of cheating.

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.

If you have to use these things in a relationship, then you already have a problem.

Jesus fuck, what did people do with their spouses and kids before phones? Trust them?

Sounds unlikely.

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?

Vile.

I trust my wife, and she trusts me. We trust each other not to ask for stupid brain-poisoning shit that humans weren't meant to have access to that could one day blow up horribly.

I don't have her passwords, she doesn't have mine. Our phones are locked. I could technically see what she's doing online I suppose via traffic snooping in the router logs but the day I feel the urge to do something like that is the day I kill myself for having abandoned basic moral principles.

We're apes, we have brains built for avoiding snakes in tall grass and finding water and berries. You poison yourself with surveillance, you feed your worst and most destructive impulses. Practice keeping secrets, practice being okay with not knowing. Trust isn't surveillance, trust is knowing that if something fucking mattered you'd be told.

edit: I want my wife to be able to break my heart because if she does she'll have a good reason for doing so. That is what trust is.

After 30 years of marriage, my wife floated the idea of turning this on. I looked at her like she had two heads.

Why would anyone be willfully surveilled? You know its not just your partner that has access to that data when you have location services enabled.

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she's often out of the house when I wake up. She's not great at replying to texts. I never know when she's going to be home, and usually have no clue what she's out doing or where.

But I know who she's doing while she's gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I'm sure if I asked, she'd share it with me, and I'd do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I'm off hiking or something in case there's an emergency, but half the time I wouldn't have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we're both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don't need to know where each other is 24/7

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.

Starting this by saying: Using tracking apps to see what someone's doing 24/7 or worrying about them cheating is insane and is a solid NO, full stop.

But I do understand why people use tracking apps, and I wish we had good FOSS alternatives. A tracking/location sharing app where the trackee can turn it on/off anytime they want (after using a password/biometrics, to prevent others from messing with it), so loved ones can be sure you made it to your destination.

I don't want people stalking their kids, judging their friends for the places they go, surveiling if someone's a cheater, or worst of all, having their data be sold by the shitty companies that run these services.

I've read stories that have scared me and made me wish I could do something like that when I'm out late. I had to (unfortunately) use Live360 during a field trip in another country cause the teachers needed to keep track of us. I understand safety-wise that these apps are vital

Man I took my kids off location sharing when they got their first phones at 12. Shit is creepy.

Just communicate!

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.

My partner and I used to use location sharing pretty much 100% of the time. We just felt better knowing we could find each other.

But today, we do not, because the trust is shattered.

Google just cannot be trusted with our locations.

Immature crap like this makes me very grateful to be a grownup married to a grownup.

So we have two camps.

1. It's a tool to be used and it's a good thing to exists and I have it enabled forever

2. Keep a gun pointed at it at all occasions and even if you use it, do so with heavy restrictions

I trust my partner and my partner trusts me but the idea of stalking her via app is mindboggling and, honestly, disgusting to me. Like a dog on a leash, always observed, always controlled. That's some mind disease shit going on. Trust your partner dammit. Ya all have issues.

On the other hand though being violently agaisnt it cuz "oh my god privacy" is also funny. The recipent is your partner. Setting it up for some specific use case shouldn't be a bother. It can be extremely usefull for example for grabbing shit in a mall - if you are not interested in going to the same shop, enable it, split, get what you need, join back, disable it.

What I am getting at is - it's a tool, but an invasive and overly controlling one. Use it how you wish but do not perceive having it on constantly as normal. It literally sounds disgusting.

Edit: For people talking about privacy - we're on lemmy. We all know how tracking works. An even if you have localisation off, your device will connect to local wifi and smart appliances to log your location anyway. So I am not really invested into discusing overall practice of having location on - only on sharing saud location.

That's creepy af

I don't know, it's a pointless thing that I just forgot to turn off at some point. I couldn't care less if she knows where I am and sometimes I do what her to know, like when I go hiking alone.

Routinely seen this cause drama between people with poor communication.

Nosy friend with it? Get ready for I'm coming by or what are you doing there texts.

know some people who use it to pick up drunk friends just in case. For emergencies. Do they use it like her? Noooooooopeeeee

Most people lack the maturity for this. It skeeves me the fuck out.

I noticed this becoming more common. Young people do so enjoyably. Old people I hear talk about it, it sounds controlling and bordering on unhinged paranoia. Those young people will be old someday too along with whatever sorts of paranoias they develop like all people seem to do

Fuck all that. If you can't be in a relationship without location sharing on then you're insecure to start.

I have my location shared with my wife because while I was working out of the house I got tired of answering the same text message ("how far from home are you so I can start dinner?") every afternoon. She's the only one in the world I have no secrets from, so I just never turned it off. I honestly don't know if she still knows I've got it shared with her.