‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’: inside the rise of couples location sharing
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How old are you guys, if you don't mind me asking? It seems that generally younger people don't see this as an innate violation of privacy, where older people feel quite surveilled and even like they're being viewed as untrustworthy for someone to ask this of them.
I've never cheated on my spouse (not even close), I've never felt any inclination to lie about my whereabouts. I can see the safety aspect of this, logically. I would feel offended if my spouse asked me to be a dot on his phone, as if he was asking to own me. We share a home, a child, a bank account, a car, but we don't share location. I don't even keep my location activated for my own use unless I'm actively navigating somewhere new.
We've got plenty of "normal" problems, but none of them lead me to want his location. I simply trust him enough. It feels to me like if you need your partners location on tap, you must first have other problems
I'm 37 and share my location with my wife. We have kids. It is an efficiency thing that we use to help decide when to begin dinner, who's grabbing the kids, etc. The whole idea of trust issues is just very high school to me.
I have my mom's location. She lives alone. She works in the city. Sometimes I like to just be sure she got home but don't need to bother her about it, or I'm at work late and can't be making phone calls.
Folks with privacy concerns, I guess I accept that. But if you think the only thing stopping the government from snatching you is your location services being off, you're sorely mistaken.
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My wife and I have our location shared with each other 24/7. Furthermore, my sister also has mine and my wife has her sister's. It has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with safety. Perhaps the real trust is not assuming your partner will use your location to control you.
No, that is creepy and you have just normalized it.
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You're kind of putting words in my mouth here.
I didn't say that I'm afraid of him dying every time they leave the house, you said that.
I'm afraid of them dying when they're traveling 20 hours. Or over a mountain pass. Or various other reasons. They travel a lot and I get worried that's just how it is.
When calculating travel costs, I also dug up some statistics and figured what the chance of crashing, injury and death were based on how much driving we do on an annual basis based on national averages.
I actually thought knowing that would make me less stressed about all the travel but it didn't help because the numbers are kind of depressing.
These same people who are suggesting you live in fear of your partner dying are also afraid their partner might find their porn collection. It's staggering. To describe location or password sharing as "vile" just puts into perspective the kind of people you're talking to.
I knowy wife's phone password, must have trust issues. Or we go on car rides and her phone is connected and the kids want me to put a song on. Should we pull over so she can unlock her phone? Vile.
Too many folks think it's to keep tabs on people, because that's presumably how they'd use it, they'd sit there and watch it.
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I don't mind my girlfriend knowing where I am because I'm not cheating on her. The only time it gets a bit weird is if me and my mates are doing something a bit stupid, one time we went to one of those trampoline centres at like 10:00 p.m. because they were having an adult night. We pushed to get massively over excited about trampolines and I ended up getting questioned about it in the morning. But hey she definitely knew I wasn't cheating on her there she just thought I was being weird
We pushed to get massively over excited about trampolines and I ended up getting questioned about it in the morning. But hey she definitely knew I wasn't cheating on her there she just thought I was being weird
This is precisely the insidious part. This is how an innocent self censorship of your privacy begins, with a harmless anecdote like this.
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I’m in the same place as you with my spouse, but we didn’t start with not trusting each other. I just never worry about my spouse knowing things about me—I cannot imagine what I wouldn’t tell her anyway.
My spouse has (multiple) physical journals lying around the house. I would never read them—she doesn’t worry about hiding them.
I hope you wouldn't invade her privacy, but I have no problem popping into my wife's Gmail (I'll ask her first), because some camp or school only sent something to her related to our kids that needs to be addressed. And there could be ten emails there from dudes names I don't know and I wouldn't care because I trust my wife implicitly. I would let her do exactly the same, I don't keep my shit on lockdown because I'm worried she'll see my Google search history.
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Nobody to answer to (and share my location).
Despite being somewhat aware of the privacy concerns of having location services always enabled, the potential of having access to finding my phone based on the service to find it (Apples and Googles feature) is more important (to me).
Same reason I have cellular always enabled.Main reason I keep location services enabled is for geo-tagged photos.
At first I always kept it disabled because of privacy trust issues (e.g. sharing a picture might not always strip the geotags) but since going on a vacation in sri lanka and being able to trace back a picture to a location it became a very useful feature.Example from my vacation in Sri Lanka:
Yeah I'd turn off location tracking where it not for photo geostamps. It's so useful and fun to track down photos.
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Uhhh, I trust her which is precisely why she has my passwords. Are you guys teenagers or something?
Also, location sharing is literally a form of communication. What if there’s an emergency?
I really think you nailed it and that folks here are either kids or never grew out of the high school mentality. It seems like they conflate trust issues with openness, and that you would only share with your spouse because your spouse doesn't trust you.
My wife has my location. My wife has had my location when I've gone to bachelor parties and done bachelor party activities. I doubt she looked at it. When I came home, I told her about things we did because we take an interest in one another's lives.
It really all comes down to efficiency. She's an hour from home and I need to start cooking dinner soon? I'll go grab the kids now and come home and get going. It just helps plan days and nights.
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lol Do you think its not made worse by turning it on?
Made worse, like they had the info before but now they really have it? They always have it, that's it. If you're concerned about privacy drop the phone, otherwise it's a bullshit argument.
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That's really not the type of person she is, or the type of relationship we have. She might well know that I'm still sharing with her, but it's not because she's controlling or untrusting. It would be because she had a reason to check recently.
Yeah, my wife has mine and I know she doesn't use it as often as she could, because I'll get the text, and I'll be like hey, just check the location. Both or jobs take us different places every day (that we aren't home), and so neither of us have a schedule, and so rather than the same texts every day, "When you home," when we're trying to figure out the kids, or dinner, or camps, or I have to go to work at night, or she has a book club meeting, or whatever other myriad things happen every day, we can skip that step. Or we have the ability to, and my wife forgets about it.
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Apple absolutely doesn’t sell that information. The way they implemented it, they can’t even collect the information to sell.
Bullshit, why would they follow the law here? The penalties are hilariously tiny compared to the profits.
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You can send it on a one-off basis in Signal. Share location, requested sparingly it can be done but seems like there are bigger issues by the time thats even necessary and coming up regularly
If I'm doing it multiple times a day every day, why not just keep it on. Do you only leave the house once? I know that for some people that is the case, wake up, go to work, come home, all on a nice schedule. That is not the case in our house, not even close, and so it's nice to be able to streamline the process of getting our shit together every day.
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Are you saying Apple doesn’t have access to my location already? Like I’m some kind of secret agent?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Third parties is plural. English kinda hard sometimes lowkey
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I don’t have her passwords, she doesn’t have mine.
Having the means for each spouse to get the others passwords can be pretty essential when dealing with critical emergencies and death. It's good to have some way for someone you trust to get your online accounts when you pass away so that everything can be concluded and canceled and sentimental content preservation and all that.
For my relationship the means to gain access to my password manager are available in the case of an emergency. Maybe shove the credentials in a bank security box and put access to it into your will if you don't feel you can trust your partner with the knowledge while you are alive.
Having the means for each spouse to get the others passwords can be pretty essential when dealing with critical emergencies and death.
I wa actually thinking about this. After I had a password breach, I wanted to setup a password manager. I wanted something. That I could host locally and access across my VPN. I also thought it would be neat to have a Deadman switch built in to it, where it pings you at set intervals and asks you to just hit a button to confirm you are alive. If you miss a certain number of pings consecutively, then it emails your specified backup contacts and has allows them to access your passwords.
Is this anything anyone here is interested in? Or does it exist already?
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Yes, Apple already has my location. Using the location finder in iOS does not share data with advertisers. Also, I spend 99% of my time at my house. Wtf kind of secret shit do you think I’m up to?
Location services definitely does something genius lmao
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That's a fair point, it's also not the issue at hand
️Its definitely a huge issue at hand.
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Made worse, like they had the info before but now they really have it? They always have it, that's it. If you're concerned about privacy drop the phone, otherwise it's a bullshit argument.
wrote last edited by [email protected]You think the toggle literally does nothing? That's insane. Third parties don't exist? Extra surveillance doesnt exist? You are fucking ignorant.
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Some of the arguments for mutual tracking relate to safety, not cheating.
None of the arguments for sharing location relate to cheating. If you are worried your partner is cheating, nothing will assuage your concerns, that is a you and them problem. I don't think for one second my wife would cheat on me, and not because I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread or anything, she's just a good, honest person, and when we have things come up in our relationship she talks to me.
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Then brake up with her!
Why you stay with partner that do not trust you?
Yea not everything works perfect inba relationship, but people should allow some space. -
Me an my GF have been sharing location for years now, it has never been an issue and often been handy to see if one of us is driving from work to home or finding each other in a festival or theme park etc.
But well I kinda wanna surprise here and for that I need to drive somewhere where I normally don't go, so now I gotta find an excuse just incase she checks my location. Or I just turn of my Phone for an hour or two
But well I kinda wanna surprise here and for that I need to drive somewhere where I normally don't go, so now I gotta find an excuse just incase she checks my location. Or I just turn of my Phone for an hour or two
Eww this is just weird you have to think about that.
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Forget your phone at home?
Wait isn't that unsafe!
