So we have two camps.
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It’s a tool to be used and it’s a good thing to exists and I have it enabled forever
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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.
The recipent is your partner.
And provider of whatever service you use to share your location. Being a bit paranoid about your privacy in this day and age is not just fearmongering and tinfoil-hats.
It can be extremely usefull for example for grabbing shit in a mall
Or communicate in advance that it’ll take 30 minutes for you to find your shit and then meet up at a cafe, by car, at lobby or whatever. Live location doesn’t add anything to that, assuming it even works reliably enough inside buildings.
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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?
If you have to use these things in a relationship, then you already have a problem.
This is the correct take.
Sounds like trust issues
today the guardian almost wrote something about a real concern that totally happened with sane people
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.
Home Assistant
(And hoping the location sharing doesnt leak to other applications).
Seconded.
And having each other’s location is really helpful. I’m nervous if my partner doesn’t know where I am.
they still have it… if your using an android phone at least… and your cell provider…
Same for any other phone manufacturer. I won’t trust Apple any more than I do with Google.
The only ones I’d actually trust to keep it somewhat private and probably LineageOS and GrapheneOS (no experience with gOS)
There are options that don’t use Google et al.
So you have suggestions?
It’s not something I’ve used very much as I don’t have much need for it, but I have used Locus a few times and I’m pretty comfortable with their privacy policy compared to the vast majority of other options.
You are still sharing it with google if you have an android phone lol
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.
I can’t believe the number of people in here with paranoia and shitty relationships that can’t communicate with their “partner”
RIGHT??? Jesus Christ people… Get some therapy
My wife only asked me to ‘follow’ her with location sharing because there was a creepy dude in the area who was approaching women. Otherwise we trust each other enough and actually communicate about the things we do. Plus we don’t cheat on each other - there’s enough stress in life without adding to it lol.
Fun fact, location sharing is literally a form of communication. Super convenient. This thread is filled with people in shitty relationships. Yikes.
You realize you are also sharing your location with third parties or you havent figured that out yet? lmao
Yes, Apple already has my location. Using the location finder in iOS does literally nothing. Also, I spend 99% of my time at my house. Wtf kind of secret shit do you think I’m up to?
If you own a smart phone, so are you.
The thread is literally talking about options that enable extra surveillance on your smart phones lmao
Me and my partner share locations. Never once have we done this. It’s purely a logistical thing. 10x faster to check someone’s location when you’re supposed to meet them instead of testing them “wya”.
Same. I don’t even recall setting it up until I stumbled on it one day and could track my wife. I pulled a few pranks until I revealed my hand but we’ve never turned it off. There’s nothing malicious about it and we’re both happy to keep it on.
Yeah, exactly. So great to be able to say, oh, she’s about 15 minutes away, so I’ll start making dinner. Much easier and safer than texting while driving, too.
We originally set it up so she could make sure I wasn’t laying in a ditch somewhere from a cycling crash.
Same. For this to be a problem, you must first have other problems.
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 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
I’d rather not disclose my age on this account, but, let’s just say we’re not newly married.
I will admit my statement about location sharing only being a problem if you’ve already got problems was a bit too binary. The issue is more nuanced.
I see you’re focusing on the cheating aspect, which to your credit is what the OP is all about. But from our perspective, that’s not even an issue or a use case for the technology. We have full trust in each other. The technology is simply useful for other reasons.
Did she make it to work in the snowstorm or rainstorm?
Huh she’s usually home by now, is she unconscious in a ditch or just stopped at the store?
Dinner is almost ready, I just need to put this in the oven so it’s ready to come out the second she walks in the door, let me make sure she’s actually on her way home. Oh, she must have gotten held up at work, I’ll wait a few more minutes.
Stuff like that. Yeah there’s other ways of solving those problems, and that’s fine too, we just prefer the convenience.
We don’t share locations because we don’t trust each other, we share because it’s convenient. I guess you could say we trust each other not to go crazy with it 🤷♂️
We have married friends who won’t share with each other, and that’s fine too.
I’ll retract my earlier statement. Location sharing is a sensitive subject, with lots of facets. Sharing or not is a personal choice. And while there can be practical benefits, I think most people would agree that using it for cheating prevention is… Unhealthy.
I’m 40 and have done this with partners.
But also, they and I have an open relationship. If they found me in the bed of another, the reaction would an excited inquiry of if I had fun.
One of the ways I knew my marriage was over, he disabled location services and left them off for months and then years. I followed when I started fucking other people.
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
That’s creepy af
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.
Hell, my wife generally knows where I’m going when I go out but only because I want to tell her and usually invite her. I’d hate for her to be able to ask why I’m at a restaurant instead of the bar I said I was going to, even if I’ll tell her about it when I get home
My partner and I share locations. We check sometimes how far away from home they are when walking the dog, or coming from work. Also handy when one of us “loses” their phone and the other can see it’s at home/in the car/at work. But we have trust, and don’t need to check where the other is spending time.
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.
Been sharing with select friends and family for years now, zero issues. And if we did have an issue? I’m turning it off for you 🤷♂️ pretty simple. Frequently extremely convenient.
A friend of a friend of mine is sharing with a friend of theirs. And it’s a crap show like you said, coming over, inviting themselves to events, why were you there, etc. Everything you said. And it’s still a problem, to the point where they leave their phone at home if they are doing anything sensitive, because they are afraid of hurting the person’s feelings by turning it off 🙄
I think the key is having a backbone, and also not having crap friends 🤷♂️
Why would you want to share your location so third parties can have access to it?
Oh 1000%
Id tell someone to fuck off so quick.
Some people are enablers for those kinds of friends. Others have no problem with it. Ex and family all shared. They’d all be in each other’s shit and were a ok with it. Was so odd to see being the polar opposite.
You’ll never be able to stop someone that wants to cheat. Best you can do is be funner and sexier than anyone else your partner might be around. Never understood why that’s so hard for some people.
That’s the gist of the success of my marriage. Even before we met, we both had reached a point of maturity where we were confident in ourselves as single people, and then from that solid base you can build the relationship in a healthy way. We both try to be the best to our partner, while being ultimately independent. These over-jealous people are using their relationship as a crutch for life so they’re terrified of it going wrong. Either that or they’re guilty themselves and projecting.
So essentially very good friends that chose to live together + benefits of being in a deeper relationship?
Sounds healthy indeed! Wish you the best to keep that bond :)
We were a couple right away so no existing friendship beforehand but within the relationship, that’s kinda how it works yeah!
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.
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.
Obviously we have wills lmao
It’s only vile when you project insecurities or bad intent…
We both know each other’s passwords for everything. We use a shared database for it. We both know each other’s phone, unlock codes and often through laziness will just use each other’s phones for shit. We shared the same bank accounts, we don’t have separate money. We share the same vehicles…etc
What’s mine is hers, what’s hers is mine. Except literally.
We also both have each other’s location. What do we use this for? Essentially nothing except when one of us is traveling, or someone is feeling neurotic/worried. The peace of mind knowing that your significant other didn’t just die in a car crash part way to their destination and are still making progress is significant.
We don’t hide things from each other, we’ve explicitly built a relationship of openness and trust, brought on by us actually_not_ trusting each other for a long time. We are completely transparent, and you know what this has helped build? Trust. Know what it has torn down? Insecurities. It’s been great.
Would recommend.
The peace of mind knowing that your significant other didn’t just die in a car crash part way to their destination and are still making progress is significant.
Bless you but the moment I start being afraid of my partner dying everytime they leave the house will be the moment I’m getting back in touch with my psychologist.
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.
Never went to work in a snowstorm? Or heavy rain?
I’m not OP, but my wife and I share locations, it’s endlessly convenient for coordinating. Never abused.
Your sanguine naïveté is enviable.
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’m exactly the same. I get that it’s not for everyone. I understand that, and respect it. But I hate people framing this as you having a trust issue.
It’s the opposite of a trust issue. I trust my wife to be responsible with my bank accounts. I trust my wife to see my location because I also trust my wife to only bother checking if she has a reasonable reason to do so, and to not be a weird paranoid freak if I’m somewhere she doesn’t expect. I trust my wife with the password to all my online accounts because it’s easier to just share a Bitwarden than it is to segregate everything, and I completely trust her to not invade my privacy.
The thing is, our lives are online. If I get hit by a bus or something, I don’t want her to have to deal with my death while ALSO figuring out how to convince banks and insurance companies and whatnot to let her in. Much easier to just share my Bitwarden with her.
I’m not in some panopticon, worrying “Oh no, what will my wife think about me being within 500 yards of an ex’s house” or whatever because I totally trust her to trust me. It’s just not an issue.
You were so untrusting you had to go to those lengths to make it so there is no way to lie to each other and you say that’s a good thing?
Therapy would be better for you than a panopticon.
What if your partner wants to run away from you? Do you not trust that they would have a good reason?
All they would have to do is turn location sharing off, and change passwords. More likely they would talk about it and agree to split rather than just run off. You know, like adults.
You are obviously not a woman.
You’re literally inventing scenarios.
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?
Why would you want to give third parties access to your locations?
Are you saying Apple doesn’t have access to my location already? Like I’m some kind of secret agent?
Yes we’re teenagers. We’ve been married 15 years, ceremony was when we were three.
Privacy is important, have you never kept a diary? Do you film therapy sessions lest your partner not know what you discussed? Shit with the door open? You don’t need justification for wanting privacy, you need privacy so when you have a good reason for it nothing looks different.
What if there’s an emergency?
What if there is? Get help, that’s an insane fear to live with. If I am unconscious there’s nothing to do anyway, the hospital or whatever will find her details in my purse and call. What the fuck am I going to do, sit there watching the dot on the map and calling 000 if it stops moving? You are a lunatic, we have society to take care of us while we’re out and about and emergency beacons if you’re like camping beyond the black stump or sailing the Pacific.
No, I’m not worried about my wife reading “my diary” because I’m not a child.
It honestly sounds like you need to work on your marriage and are projecting. Maybe try a couple’s therapist?
Very hinged lemmy comment.
I imagine this form of abuse is done by sociopaths that convinced their traumatised partners this is actually a good thing.
All the people in this thread that they do it for years and it’s normal? Sociopaths.
My wife has done courses on warning signs for abusive relationships as part of some mental health first aid certification stuff.
2 biiiiiig red flags are insisting on surveillance and not letting people have separate finances. We have a combined account sure, and also pocket money accounts and whatever else. For all I know she’s set up a trust. I mean I don’t think she has because she’d probably tell me but she has the freedom to do so.