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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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    Never. Not even once.

  • If a partner demand they have it on to prove they're not cheating, then they should be looking for a different partner.

    The partner demanding that is projecting like a Barco DP2K-32B.

  • I am more worried that she is going to spoil the surprise for herself ...

    Forget your phone at home?

  • Forget your phone at home?

    There is no chance she is going to believe that I drive 40-60min without my phone dor mysic lol, but I could try it.

    Or I just say that I have an appointment with a client of mine (if she asks), that also works

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

  • 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.

    One of my gf's friends went through a pretty nasty breakup, moved and whatnot and most of her friend group were trying to make sure that the ex and his friends didn't have their location anymore and I'm just sitting here like "its wild that you have to go through that" well a couple weeks later 3 of her tires were stabbed with a screw driver or something, and while there's no concrete evidence that they learned where she moved, I'm still over here trying to get them all to be more conscious about online privacy and location sharing, but nothing works....

  • They see random acts of violence in the news

    Which is the only thing the news shows them to begin with.. almost as if they cherry-pick stuff.

    BREAKING NEWS: Girl gets home safely after night out. More at 11.

  • People my age have their whole friend groups on location sharing apps like that, it's awful.

    Why, though?

  • 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.

    Since you're one of the few people that admit to you and your partner using it: What do you think about the company knowing where you are at all times?

  • Humans are awful at accessing risk and chance, one of the reasons casinos and lotteries thrive.

    Look at fear of flying for an example, all statistics say you are many many many times over more likely to get into a car accident on your way to the airport, than during the flight. Even when the ride to the airport is usually short and the flight very long. Yet people are afraid of flying, but not going by car. By percentage, there are of course those, rightly so, afraid of cars as well.

    Risk assessment is probability and severity. The probability can be vanishingly low, but if the severity is astoundingly high then acting like a high risk situation could be appropriate.

    Take asteroids. The last planet killer to hit us was 94million years ago. A rudimentary estimate could put the probably as 1:94mil. The severity of an asteroid impact of that magnitude is off the charts, so it is reasonable to consider it a risk and act accordingly to spend resources to search for and track asteroid trajectories.

    The severity of abduction, murder, and rape is probably pretty high for most people, so considering it a risk even with a very small probability is not unreasonable.

  • 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.

    Legally and practically, prenups are anything but passive. They’re proactive tools. They’re usually dormant, but they’re ready to be called into action.

    Marriage is different things to different people. Some have every intention to make it work, no matter what. To them, a prenup is an anti-“burn the ship”. It’s a statement.

    Also, tools like “find my” are not major breaches of privacy if both parties jointly agree to use them. For me and my family, it’s the ultimate expression of trust. I’m never somewhere I shouldn’t be, and I like my family knowing where I am, for a multitude of reasons.

    There are two types of people who a tracker wouldn’t be effective for: those who are in an inappropriate location, and those who are constantly questioning why someone is in an innocent place, regardless of where it may be. However, at that point, the issue isn’t the trackers; it’s the people.

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

    This. If your partner is jealous, you're not the problem. If they can't work through it with you, walk.

    People with trust issues are exhausting. Make sure they're worth it without losing yourself.

    Signed,
    Experienced

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

  • 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?

    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.

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

    My wife always has my location. I regularly go out for hours on my motorcycle and I'll tell her I'm going for a hour ride and get lost in the woods for 3. Years ago I had to call her to pick me up after a truck decided to go left in front of me and shattered my arm into 4 pieces. Caller her from the hospital bed high as fuck on morphine. She has my location so if I stop responding for hours she can make sure I didn't wind up in a medical center LOL.

  • 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.

    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.

    My wife and I are the same. Shared location means rather than a message saying "are you on your way home?" you can just check where they're at. If I'm out on a late night callout she can see where I am instead of worrying or constantly pinging for updates. Meeting somewhere? Live updates keeps everyone in sync, and let's you know if you've got time to do something on the way or if they're already waiting or whatever.

    People must be in some super unhappy relationships if they see location sharing as nefarious.

  • My wife always has my location. I regularly go out for hours on my motorcycle and I'll tell her I'm going for a hour ride and get lost in the woods for 3. Years ago I had to call her to pick me up after a truck decided to go left in front of me and shattered my arm into 4 pieces. Caller her from the hospital bed high as fuck on morphine. She has my location so if I stop responding for hours she can make sure I didn't wind up in a medical center LOL.

    That is entirely different than suspecting you of cheating every moment she doesn't have eyes on you.

  • 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

    Same with my wife. I even have it set up for my mother, so I know she’s safe. I don’t understand what the big deal is, as you say it’s a safety and convenience feature, it doesn’t mean you spend the day looking at the app to see where the other person is.

    It’s not something I would do in a casual or new relationship, but if I’m with somebody for years, I value their safety over my (perceived) privacy.

    And for the people who think this would prevent or bust cheating: lol. They can just turn it off and complain of bad reception, or leave their phone in their car, while they “shop at the mall”. Or just get a second phone. This app is not a substitute for trust

    Regarding tech privacy: it’s not like
    other apps on your phone are not already tracking, I doubt anybody has their GPS constantly turned off. They already know your location, this one feature doesn’t make a difference.

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    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.

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

    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 to 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.

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    G
    Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company. I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law. I could be too naive, but I think it is possible. We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company. The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it. The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage. So how much money your privacy it's worth ? 6 For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful. The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don't want to break the law. I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them. Trust me on this one, direct experience payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work. I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws. For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime. It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that. Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience. In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting. Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
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    I think it would be best if that's a user setting, like dark mode. It would obviously be a popular setting to adjust. If they don't do that, there will doubtless be grease monkey and other scripts to hide it.
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    glizzyguzzler@lemmy.blahaj.zoneG
    Indeed I did not, we’re at a stalemate because you and I do not believe what the other is saying! So we can’t move anywhere since it’s two walls. Buuuut Tim Apple got my back for once, just saw this now!: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27197259 I’ll leave it at that, as thanks to that white paper I win! Yay internet points!
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    Small progress is still progress. Kick management in the dick, friends.