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.
‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’: inside the rise of couples location sharing
Submitted 1 month ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/24/inside-the-rise-of-couple-location-sharing
Comments
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 month ago
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is how it works with us too.
I’m kind of neurotic and get worried that something may have happened to her while she’s traveling, which she does a lot. If she’s supposed to arrive somewhere and hasn’t I start pacing and biting my nails thinking of all the bad things that could have happened.
We shared each other’s location and the peace of mind has helped a lot.
We don’t keep secrets from each other. Some folks in this thread see location sharing as a threat, I assume because they are uncomfortable or have existing trust issues with their relationship that are yet to be resolved?
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I’m kind of neurotic
The solution to this is to deal with the neurosis, not to try and control all the information. You’re giving in to your negative thoughts with unhealthy behaviour instead of dealing with it properly.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
She does.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 month ago
To me it’s weird that people have issues with this. My wife and I, married 35 years, share each other’s locations because if something bad happened we would want to be able to find each other. I don’t even give a second thought to, “…and I can make sure she isn’t cheating on me.”
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Honestly, with the current political situation in my country, this might be a good idea.
ConstantPain@lemmy.world 1 month ago
People don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with this tool.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
My wife and I have each other’s locations. We trust each other. We just like having that information available. It’s really not that hard to understand.
NeilBru@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Not hard to understand, no, but many find it to be creepy and invasive.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Not hard to understand, no, but many find it to be creepy and invasive.
Those people are free to not use the tech. Being forced to use the tech, however, is absolutely a problem.
PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Yeah like … I trust my husband, and I am also not his keeper, so I do not need to know where he is 24/7. I find it very odd and invasive.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A lot of those people are projecting their insecurities onto others relationships.
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
It sounds like you and your wife have a healthy relationship. That’s awesome! But, for possessive and controlling relationships, surveillance can be harmful.
Personally, my location is shared with my sister. I’d share it with my partner but he is a bit of a Luddite. I wouldn’t be sharing because he asked, I would be doing it so he could find me easily in an emergency.
And, I wouldn’t ask him to share his. If he turned it on and wanted me to have it, that’s cool. And if not, that’s cool too.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
But, for possessive and controlling relationships, surveillance can be harmful.
Absolutely. My previous marriage was like that. Luckily the topic of location tracking never came up.
PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This kind of shit is pretty common for younger people. I work as a teacher, and I hear students talk about this all the time. I tell them how unhealthy it is blah, blah, blah. My SO tells the younger people at her work “If I had PumpkinSkink’s location sharing on he couldn’t surprise me with cake from the bakery”. She has had more success than I getting people to stop.
supermurs@kbin.earth 1 month ago
We only share our locations when for example my wife is coming home from shopping groceries so that I know when to go out to the parking lot to help carry the groceries home.
I had no idea people share locations constantly.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My friend shares her’s with me continuously. I do not share mine. I see no point. I don’t even know why she shares her’s with me. I’ve only found it a bit useful two or three times over the years. And more of in a “I don’t have to walk around this area to find her” way. If I didn’t have her location I’d just walk around a couple minutes to I spotted her.
tal@lemmy.today 1 month ago
I kind of don’t want to send my location to “location sharing” companies to sell to data brokers.
commander@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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
jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 month ago
At least when they get lost because of dementia it'll be easy to find them.
0x0@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Kids these days® were born into a world of surveillance capitalism, so they have no reference to compare it to.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sounds like trust issues
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
If my partner could check my location at any time, how would I keep bday and anniversary gifts secret? The places where I go to buy things for her are not places I would normally go. She only has to randomly check one time when I’m at an unusual location for her to ask why and then I have to lie. Not worth it.
We use temporary sharing (can limit to one hour) when meeting somewhere. Beyond that, it’s a potential liability.
Example: she once got upset that I wanted to go to the mail room (apt building) alone and didn’t want her to go with me. She wanted to know what I was hiding. Turned out to be her bday gift and it was just in the commercial packaging with a shipping label. I let her go get it and she’s never been suspicious of my motives since (this was at the very start of our relationship and we hadn’t established the level of trust that we have now).
Anyway, again, the one-hour sharing is all we need.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sounds like you guys have some serious trust issues. If sharing your location with each other devolves that quickly, it ain’t the tech making problems.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
I already stated that it only happened once at the start of the relationship. I trust my partner completely and she has never second-guessed me since.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is dumb. Young couples have been plagued by insecurity long before location sharing. Dial the clock back 20 years and I’m your typical high school boy worried about his girlfriend.
I share my location with my wife, and even some buddies of mine. My wife has seen my location when I was at someone’s bachelor party. It has nothing to do with sharing location and everything to do with trust in your relationship. I don’t have her location to keep tabs on her. I have her location so we can better figure out how to get our kids from places. I have my buddies’ locations so if I end up grabbing a beer, I know who’s out and about, or when someone goes to Tanzania, I can say, Joe, what the hell are you doing in Tanzania?
Before location sharing you texted, or you called, or you hit me on my pager, or sent me a letter. Technology isn’t the problem, it’s – once again – just us dumb people being dumb.
Ibuthyr@feddit.org 1 month ago
What’s wrong with giving the spouse a quick call when they’re worried about them? Fuck sharing your location, what kind of dumb shit is this? If anything, sharing your location might actually make them paranoid in the first place, as they might try to interpret things in your movement. The hell is wrong with people? I’ve never heard of this behavior, is this something Americans do?
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
call? what kind of dumb shit is that?
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’ll look and see my wife is distant and I’ll shoot her a text and say “Grabbing the kids.” We each work jobs that take us different places every day (her more than me since COVID), and so we aren’t able to rely on some set pattern. I’m able to just see where she is and make a decision. Half the time she’s in the car she’s on the phone for some meeting and so I can’t call. It just makes things easier. I can’t fathom why it upsets you so much, but if you wanna chalk it up to America bad, you do you.
VisionScout@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’ - then fuck your girlfriend. How can you be in a relationship without trust?
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I feel like this shit would end badly for everyone.
Remember how people used to lie and say they were sleeping over at their friend’s house or going to so and sos so they wouldn’t have to say where they were. Now I guess they can hand their phone to their friend at school/bus and tell them to take it home and carry their watch/tablet/laptop that they can get/respond to texts without the tracking location being on with that device.
jhymesba@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My wife and I have location sharing enabled in case something happens to one of us. We usually don’t use it, but its good to have when we need to meet up at an unfamiliar place after something goes sideways for one of us.
But if your SO doesn’t trust you enough to allow you private moments and would accuse you of cheating, your relationship isn’t based on trust and thus is very weak.
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 1 month ago
When we need to know each others location, we share it via element / matrix. Our own server, so no third party.
Happens maybe four times a year.
(Also, do you just always have location services enabled?? IMO it’s a battery drain, I pretty much only enable it for this and while I need to navigate)
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
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:
ImageRedex68@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah I’d turn off location tracking where it not for photo geostamps. It’s so useful and fun to track down photos.
ObsidianZed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I know several people that do this, but most often it’s parents with kids. That’s still not an excuse though as there deserve their own privacy. In all cases that I’ve seen though, it’s through Apple/iPhones. Now I’m not saying Android users can’t or don’t do this, but Apple makes it so easy, that it’s everywhere and I hate that.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 1 month ago
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
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
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.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Mhe, it’s only once in the last 10 years that I have to think about it and it’s an easy thing to solve.
panathea@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
In my 8-or-so years of using it with my partner, close friends, and some family, the only occasion where I turned it off was when visiting a jewelry store for an engagement ring.
I know I have less privacy in principle, but I’ve never had an issue crop up so far.
0x0@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Cheater!
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 1 month ago
I am more worried that she is going to spoil the surprise for hereself …
jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
It’s really disturbing how everyone sees this practice through the lens of trust. Can you really think of no other reasons? Absurd.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 1 month ago
“I trust you enough to monitor me at all times. :)”
“I don’t trust you enough not to. (:”
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Creepy
RBWells@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Not just couples. I was aghast to learn that my fellow parents at work track the location of their teenage kids. All of them, except me. What the fuck? If I want to know where they are I text and ask.
What’s more - half of them also have it turned on in the other direction.
This is crazy to me. I want my kids to grow into adults and I’m not going to surveil them all the time. I think a kid of teen age has some reasonable expectation of privacy. We are close, I have a good relationship with my kids but not THAT close, I don’t need to know if you stopped at Wawa on your way home.
dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Trust is good, control is not better.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I do this location sharing with someone.
The only time it crosses my mind to check it is when they are coming to visit or we are otherwise traveling or meeting up.
I thankful for whatever makes it easy for me to just be chill about it.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Life360?
paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That sounds right
bigbabybilly@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Quit cheating or split up. It’s not complicated.
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Also like, have we all forgotten about the possibility of someone having two phones.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Yes, most sane persons I know have disavowed the entire concept of being with someone else.
And archaic leftover of a more dependant age.
Now it’s just handcuffs with no upside
Ending cheating is as easy as ending “being in a couple”
and for people who can imagine life without this crutch
it becomes more and more foreign why anyone
would ever accept such an oppressive custom into their householdrat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Could you explain what you mean by calling it an oppressive custom? Personally, I love being with someone. It has the upside of me getting to enjoy companionship with another human being, and it doesn’t feel like handcuffs. Sometimes I have to do things that I wouldn’t do otherwise for the sake of my partner’s feelings/wellbeing, but isn’t that the case in all relationships? Romantic, familial, platonic, or otherwise? If my partner wants me to do something I’m truly uncomfortable with (like allowing them to track my location), and we can’t agree on a compromise, I’d just end that relationship and find someone I’m more compatible with.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Do we all really think this is a great idea when fascism and toxic masculinity are catastrophically growing globally like a late stage mestastized cancer?
Do you think enabling all those men to abusively control their spouses is just the forward march of technological progress?
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I assumed the quote in the article was a man talking about his woman would think he’s cheating.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
same
omniman@piefed.zip 1 month ago
First step - get a gf
MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Just treat them like regular people, like you would anyone else, and they’ll come to you. Basically, you don’t have to hit on them. Just be their friend. Let it happen naturally.
SonOfAntenora@lemmy.world 1 month ago
a common way to keep tabs on friends, family and romantic partners so I allow the app to alert him each time I reach my front door. In a disappointingly heteronormative and retrograde move, I’m more interested in knowing when he goes out – where’s he off to now? – and set up my own notifications accordingly. Having grown up with the internet, gen Z are, generally, more comfortable sharing their data online; Snapchat, the social media platform notoriously most popular with younger users, has long incorporated location sharing with its Snap Maps feature.
Does anyone even have a private moment at all? Also if I were to cheat I’d leave my phone in a very specific spot if I can. Faux location services may work, but mostly switching to a feature phone seems to be secret trick that shuts down these app fueled nightmare.
Oh, sorry, the battery is down I had to switch to my old phone for a moment! When did we stop having private moments and thoughts? I like tech when it aides me, but recently it has been feeding off my personal time and even some order of thoughts in ways it didn’t do before. It almost feels like it tries to fix and set up human emotions in ways that are forced.
Do you want technology to replace normal communication and socialisation skills? Or does it even matter to you that it is what happens now. Remember that only a few years before nobody followed you all the day, and even the internet access was relegated to a computer room. How far have we come from that?
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Snapchat, the social media platform notoriously most popular with younger users, has long incorporated location sharing with its Snap Maps feature
Fuck me. I dont even share my first and last name with any social media site, much less my photo. My current location? The fuck is wrong with people?
SonOfAntenora@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Having public social media can be useful. And it was always possible even before (oh yes MySpace). My issue is having this eternal access as a proof of existance on you all the time. I am fine with the idea of having a public life, what triggers me is the normalisation of surveillance from subjects who never had the concept of being surveillance actors in the first place.
Not to mention, how many abusive partners are already using this feature already? I guess many more than just jealus couples. Airtags had the same problems, but thera are apps to let you spot them, even than they’re an invasive technology. Position sharing can be invasive too. Even voluntary sharing is probably worse than we think.
There are few cases where i can think this as a useful feature, like incidents or other unspecified situations.
The one thing that stands out is that this is active constantly. It’s not situational. The article doesn’t do a good job at detailing the possible abuses of the function but they’re there, they were the same with gps trackers and airtags. Gps devices are notoriously expensive relative to these alternatives so nowadays only a certain person would use them.
crapwittyname@feddit.uk 1 month ago
MashedTech@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have location sharing between me and my friends because… What if something happens to any of us? That’s it, nothing else, I don’t spy on them.
RagingRobot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
To share my location with my partner I need to share it with a third part also and I’m pretty selective about that so I never even signed up for this kind of thing.
I use location services but just leave them off until I need them. I’m not super hard to find anyways
thenose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lol. I keep telling my partner that I’m sharing my location data with her so don’t need to worry where I might be (Im pretty bad at reporting home unfortunately)
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hey bros. I’m just letting you know about this terrible app called GPS spoofer. Please don’t install this on your phone by mistake.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I second the caution for these apps. I’ve been living on Utupoa Island for the last four years and didn’t even know it.
Surp@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Fuck all that. If you can’t be in a relationship without location sharing on then you’re insecure to start.
theangryseal@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I can’t imagine having something like this.
You know what kind of couples I have known who use it?
Yep. That kind. The constant accusation, constant fighting, constant chaos kind. The same kind who share a Facebook account and all that.
I guess my bias there would be that those would also be the kind of people who advertise it.
I was standing beside an old coworker one time when her husband called, “babe, don’t freak out when I start moving. The boss is sending me to harbor freight to pick up some things.”
I got a call from her in the middle of the night one time, “I’m sitting by the lake and I’m about do drive my car in and kill myself.”
She knew her husband didn’t like me so she thought I wouldn’t call him. Well, I called him. “That bitch is lying. Life 360 has her sitting at her mom’s house right now. She just fucking wants attention!”
Still, I called a friend and asked them to drive by and see. Yep. She was at her mom’s house.