Technology

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.

Meanwhile, I often work with immediate risk of death or injury and, by law, I can not be equipped with a panic button for rescue purposes, as it is deemed unlawful surveillance of the worker.

I am supposed to warn in advance what work I will be doing and agree on a reasonable time window for it to be done safely, before having to call in again to say I am not yet dead and if the task is done or not.

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

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.

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

Trust is good, control is not better.

If I was actively sharing locations with someone and theirs just abruptly vanished, I'd be concerned that something happened to them... either share or don't share.

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. It’s nice to not have to manually mess with an app when needed. And it’s there in an emergency.

Edit: oh shit. This reminds me that I saw one of those 360 something ads recently. I usually avoid tv ads, but happened to see one. It was unhinged in how it was stoking paranoia to sell the tracking. It was targeted at parents.