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

Why, though?

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I trust my family. Trust them enough that they have the passcode to my phone and can easily open it at any time.

But I'm not sharing location. How will I sneak out to buy gifts if they get a notification when I leave work? Nope.

Also turn on the electric blanket if we are out and heading towards home after 9pm

Make sure it defaults to OFF after power loss. My colleague had a close call when the smart plug with the infra panel plugged in decided to turn on after the power outage.

This is like, the opposite of old-fashioned. Calling your wife when you're on the way home is old-fashioned.

This article is the first time I'm actually hearing about this idea because it never even occurred to me as something people would actually want to do. I frankly don't see the point of this nonsense. I would much rather talk to my wife on the phone and communicate with her about plans. It's much more human and normal, and facilitates good communication habits. It takes 2 minutes to give my wife a call and, you know what, I get to talk to my wife! We don't need technology invading absolutely every aspect of our lives. We don't need to be constantly plugged in and attached to our phones at the hip.

It also has other downsides, like making it hard to surprise your partner, constant battery drain from the constant location chatter, etc. In fact, it seems like all downside with no actual benefit (setting aside the trust stuff, because it's pretty irrelevant either way).

If you trust your partner completely, then you trust them to use your location information responsibly, right?

No. But it isn't about that, anyway. Those apps sell your location data to advertisers and governments, and I'm not installing that bullshit on my phone after I kicked google off of it with grapheneOS.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

If this was demanded of me, I would end the relationship immediately. That's absolutely not worth it.