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‘If I switch it off, my girlfriend might think I’m cheating’: inside the rise of couples location sharing

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  • 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.

    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?

  • 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.

  • Call me old fashioned, but I put it in the same bucket as a prenup

    I don't agree. Prenups are passive, they don't do anything until not needed. all the while this is a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust.

    all the while this is a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust.

    How? My situation is similar to the person you’re replying to and I’m curious how two consenting adults sharing their location with each other is “a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust”.

    Maybe if one party is unwilling or has no say/control in location sharing but specifically in the scenario at hand I don’t see it.

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    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.

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    People don't have the emotional maturity to deal with this tool.

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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

  • all the while this is a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust.

    How? My situation is similar to the person you’re replying to and I’m curious how two consenting adults sharing their location with each other is “a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust”.

    Maybe if one party is unwilling or has no say/control in location sharing but specifically in the scenario at hand I don’t see it.

    because you are not sharing your location with each other. you are sharing your location with a greedy company that also lets your significant other, and then the highest bidder access this information. they are doing whatever they please with it to make (even more) money.
    see, I was so into google's timeline feature years ago. but soon after I realized privacy is a thing I was disgusted of it and turned it off. if you run nextcloud and that addon I don't remember, or reitti, at home and use that, and you keep is somewhat safe*, then it's fine, and I could imagine using that, even just for myself.

    I should have explained that. for some reason I tend to assume that lemmy users are privacy conscious, but that's probably not true.

    * don't expose the services because your data will get stolen and you'll get hacked by automated systems. run a VPN on the server, only expose the port of that. then you can access the services through a VPN. wireguard is relatively simple, and it's secure.

  • 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?

    You're literally inventing scenarios.

  • 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

  • because you are not sharing your location with each other. you are sharing your location with a greedy company that also lets your significant other, and then the highest bidder access this information. they are doing whatever they please with it to make (even more) money.
    see, I was so into google's timeline feature years ago. but soon after I realized privacy is a thing I was disgusted of it and turned it off. if you run nextcloud and that addon I don't remember, or reitti, at home and use that, and you keep is somewhat safe*, then it's fine, and I could imagine using that, even just for myself.

    I should have explained that. for some reason I tend to assume that lemmy users are privacy conscious, but that's probably not true.

    * don't expose the services because your data will get stolen and you'll get hacked by automated systems. run a VPN on the server, only expose the port of that. then you can access the services through a VPN. wireguard is relatively simple, and it's secure.

    I get that it’s not privacy focused; so much these days isn’t, but I’m still not understanding how two adults knowingly enabling location sharing via a 3rd party service is “a major breach of privacy, for both parties, and also of trust”.

    I’m gathering that your intent was more along the lines of “it’s not very privacy conscious since you have no control over how the 3rd party uses that data or any way to control it”, would that be accurate?

  • 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.

    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.

  • Yep. This is one of those hard lines for me. And I feel like it's a red flag for anyone who demands it from a partner.

    I trust my partner and they trust me. I actively encourage them to do things without me, because I want them to be an independent person. I want them to have friends that I don't hang out with.

    I comment in a different part of this thread how my spouse and just share everything, but I complete get what you are saying.

  • For one, it wrecks your battery life.

    Secondly, everyone I know my age keeps GPS off unless using a mapping program.

    Finally regarding app privacy, people do care about that which is why grapheneos and other privacy focused OS's exist.

    The fact that you don't care about privacy and want the government and corporations to have every sext you've ever received or sent doesn't mean that others don't care as well.

    Google map's location sharing does not even impact battery life.

  • 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.

    You don't need anything other than home assistant though, right? the companion apps already just do that

  • 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

    I wish there was one that didn't require nearly every phone permission all the time.

  • There is the case of the worriers. People who, when not given positive confirmation otherwise, assume the worst. I'm not talking cheating, but like accidents. "He's 5 minutes late, maybe he got in a car accident and died!" It's not healthy, but it is common and isn't a trust issue.That said, my partner doesn't get to track me, and I have no interest in tracking them.

    I mean that's me to a T but I just suppress those thoughts.

  • There is the case of the worriers. People who, when not given positive confirmation otherwise, assume the worst. I'm not talking cheating, but like accidents. "He's 5 minutes late, maybe he got in a car accident and died!" It's not healthy, but it is common and isn't a trust issue.That said, my partner doesn't get to track me, and I have no interest in tracking them.

    I don't think enabling it is a good idea though. Yeah, they might be worried, but they need to learn to handle those thoughts. Feeding them can only make it worse.

  • I'm assuming this is a young group, and they've grown up in the always-connected, always-surveilled modern world.

    I've met plenty of people that are surprised or even suspicious when I say that I try to avoid corporations and governments tracking me. I guess the Overton window has shifted so that people expect and accept constant surveillance.

    As a fairly privacy conscious person, I also expect and accept that it's happening too. I don't think you can be privacy conscious and not accept that. You have to be ignorant to think you can hide it all. I do my best to keep as much data out of their hands as possible though. I don't agree with it.

  • Most people my age that I know have location tracking shared with SO’s. It’s considered a step in the relationship.

    It's be a step out of the relationship with me.

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    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.

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    I keep getting propaganda from the terrorist staye of israel
  • Why does technology create new problems for each one it solves?

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    Not really, there's an OR logical element present in our world. Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible. And the "80%" and "20%" solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators). Nobody does that because the "80% solution" producer wants to capture you, they don't want alternatives, they want power, and it's a honeypot. It's up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn't it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it's much more important. As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings ... you get the idea.
  • Apple sues YouTuber for alleged iOS 26 trade-secret theft

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    You can read it two ways: gee they’re so WFH friendly they drive their people hard and they work nights and weekends
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 28 Stimmen
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    D
    The writing in this story is not accurate. Iran isn't turning it off for the country. They are talking about switching government services to use receivers that use Beidou as primary source of timing and maybe selectively turn off using GPS on those devices.
  • Is Matrix cooked?

    Technology technology
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    Didn't know it only applied to UWP apps on Windows. That does seem like a pretty big problem then. it is mostly for compatibility reasons. no win32 programs are equipped to handle such granular permissions and sandboxing, they are all made with the assumption that they have access to whatever they need (other than other users' resources and things that require elevation). if Microsoft would have made that limitation to every kind of software, that Windows version would have probably been a failure in popularity because lots of software would have broken. I think S editions of windows is how they tried to go in that direction, with a more drastic way of simply just dropping support for 3rd party win32 programs. I don't still have a Mac readily available to test with but afaik it is any application that uses Apple's packaging format. ok, so if you run linux or windows utils in a compatibility layer, they still have less of a limited access? by which I mean graphical utilities. just tried with firefox, for macos it wanted to give me an .iso file (???) if so, it seems apple is doing roughly the same as microsoft with uwp and the appx format, and linux with flatpak: it's a choice for the user
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    tryenjer@lemmy.worldT
    In short, we will need an open-source alternative to these implants, of course.
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    I think a generic plug would be great but look at how fragmented USB specifications are. Add that to biology and it's a whole other level of difficulty. Brain implants have great potential but the abandonment issue is a problem that exists now that we have to solve for. It's also not really a tech issue but a societal one on affordability and accountability of medical research. Imagine if a company held the patents for the brain device and just closed down without selling or leasing the patent. People with that device would have no support unless a government body forced the release of the patent. This has already happened multiple times to people in clinical trials and scaling up deployment with multiple versions will make the situation worse. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2818077 I don't really have a take on your personal desires. I do think if anyone can afford one they should make sure it's not just the up front cost but also the long term costs to be considered. Like buying an expensive car, it's not if you can afford to purchase it but if you can afford to wreck it.