Putting aside how much of a red flag that is,
Is there any foss self-hosted version of these location sharing services?
If the only thing stopping your partner from cheating is location sharing then you’ve got problems.
Safety concerns aside, you should trust your partner enough to not need to track them
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’ve already solved that by not finding a partner 😎👎
Exactly. My girlfriend will disappear for an entire day and not come home until 10pm. I usually have no idea where she is or what she’s doing (mainly because I forget due to having ADHD), but I don’t worry about it because I know she’ll never cheat. How can a person even be with someone who they don’t trust? Without trust, there is no relationship IMO.
that doesn’t always work out the way you’re expecting though, but I agree, trust should be opt-out.
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 mean that’s me to a T but I just suppress those thoughts.
Relationships based on trust?!
Surely you jest!For me, knowing my spouse’s location is just convenient for knowing ETA without bothering her. It’s not really about trust at all
Same. We both follow each other and neither of us care. We mostly have it enabled for the “just in case” scenario that anything happens to one of us. We can make sure that we know of our last known location.
I’ve also had her use it one time I was away from home in NYC. And I was too drunk to figure out which subway to take to get back to my hotel. So she walked me through step by step while on the phone with me. It fucking rocked.
Exactly my thought. It’s nothing to do with jealousy and just kind of convenient if you need to meet up or are seeing if they’re on their way home and can get dinner started or whatever.
I figure if my phone manufacturer and cell providers are tracking me all day, why not also my closest friends and family.
There should also be enough trust for either side to never use it except for emergencies.
If you can’t trust your spouse without location, tracking, find another spouse.
No they need therapy not another spouse. They shouldn’t have a spouse at all until they’ve fixed their own insecurities.
Of all the dystopian things, this is probably the most dystopian thing I’ve read lately.
This is horrible.
People my age have their whole friend groups on location sharing apps like that, it’s awful.
Wtf? Is this the outcome of growing up with helicopter parents or where are those trust issues coming from?
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.
When I say I don’t accept, I don’t mean I live in denial, I mean I don’t acquiesce - I resist it, whether that be by avoiding services/products, paying for premium, installing ad blockers or modding things to remove telemetry.
I am aware that my phone company knows where I am and I’m on cameras, but I’m not going to make it easy for the next Cambridge Analytica.
It’s nothing about trust issues- privacy is just a foreign concept to that generation. It was dead and gone before they were born. They take for granted that eveyone has their phone on them at all times and is never unreachable, so knowing where all your friends are is just a matter of convenience.
I’ve actually done a little to combat this, in my personal life (apart from ordinary privacy stuff like librewolf und Linux). I got so sick of the majority of my friends expecting me to reply to every text message within 30 minutes, and then getting extremely offended when I didn’t (simply because I don’t look at my phone that often), that I turned off read-receipts on all my messaging apps, and set my notifications to only arrive in groups at specific times of day.
Then I made a habit of not answering unimportant messages for a few days, until I got the reputation that I pretty much don’t use my phone (I also don’t use conventional social media, and none of my friends even know I’m in lemmy). This worked like a charm! My social life much, much less stressful.
I’ve broken the absurd contract that so many people seem to think they have a right to. My time is now my own. I can highly recommend this system! Of course, I can’t do it for work-related stuff, but it still really has reduced my stress by a lot.
Helicopter parents have got nothing to do with it.
Witch your age group. Do you mind giving examples where it’s been helpful and maybe examples when it’s not been so helpful?
Like 16-17, I don’t talk to the people that do that too much because they’re not the type of person I like hanging out with, so I don’t really know why they do it.
It’s like an extension of their group chats, on snapchat.
Why, though?
Some friends of mine have literally hundreds of friends with their Snapchat location sharing on
Most people my age that I know have location tracking shared with SO’s. It’s considered a step in the relationship.
Grim
It’s be a step out of the relationship with me.
Here’s something even worse, IMO, if you’d like to check it out.
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
Yeah I know many who just use it as a practical tool in the day to day.
Even know friend groups who use it between themselves (they all live close together)
SnapMap is also very popular, obv less accurate but nice to see who is in town
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.
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.
This says otherwise https://geofinder.mobi/blog/does-location-sharing-drain-battery/
that might as well be AI generated. there are no numbers, just some dumb matrix with arbitrary reasoning and now evidence. I’m all for evidence to the contrary, but this is not that
While I can’t find any source to back up my claim that it certainly drains some amount of battery, can you provide any evidence that it doesn’t impact battery life? Given that GPS uses significant processing power
She could text you, no? It seems like getting her to be better at that is better than opening the can of worms involved with location sharing. For example, here’s some bad stuff that could happen:
- phone sells that data to advertisers
- gov’t gets that info and you trigger an alarm (maybe you went hiking a little too close to a sensitive area)
- data breach happens and now crooks know when you’re not home
- SO’s creepy friend sees your location and is secretly stalking you
Etc. Those probably aren’t super likely, but being able to avoid it all entirely with a little better communication sounds a lot better.
Sometimes it’s worth it, like you’re going hiking alone or going to a bad part of town.
Yes, clearly the solution is to make her change her behavior. Needing your SO to change themselves is definitely a sign of a healthy relationship.
In a committed relationship, each side should be open to small changes.
Isn’t it strange that “trusting” someone now, means letting them constantly spy on you?
I talked to some late teens about it some months ago. They see it as an “I give you permission to see my every move” kind of thing, as in they have nothing to hide. And they do it pretty early on in relationships, as a show of commitment.
I got my SO to turn off location tracking on Snapchat because I got a message from a family member about his location. She had screenshotted his location from the snap map, searched the address, found the person living there, searched him up, found out he’s also gay, and wondered if I knew he was out with another man?! FYI we attended a dinner party at the guys home.
That’s the level of insane some people get. Constant surveillance, mixed with insecurities and stories of cheating, and you’ve got a shitty ass cocktail.
Me having location shared with my partner of 20 years is one thing. But sharing it with anyone else? Fuck no.
I wouldn’t even share my location with my SO of 10+ years. Why? They don’t need it, and there’s tons of potential negative things with that (phone manufacturer sells it, gov’t takes it w/ backdoor deals, breach reveals it, etc).
I don’t want my SO’s location information, and they shouldn’t want mine. If I’m doing some high risk activity, like doing a long hike alone, sure, but it’s going off immediately after.
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…
Yeah we use it with home assistant, and Bluetooth beacons to turn on the garden lights when we get home, and turn on interior lights if neither of us are marked as home. Also turn on the electric blanket if we are out and heading towards home after 9pm. Also the person detection camera only alerts us if we aren’t home.
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.
Yes we have several of the AthomTech ones that ship with Esphome. There’s a power loss setting on them “on, off, as before”
Would you mind sharing your automation yaml for the garden lights? I’d love to do more with Bluetooth beacons but don’t know enough about how they work to do anything with them.
We have it hidden in the letterbox. The mobile app has a Bluetooth beacon setting where you can have it report either specified beacons to HA, or all of them and you can filter for the ones you want at that end.
The automation looks for the beacon to be reported from either of 2 devices and then switches the lights on, quite basic.
We have a separate automation that turns the scanning for beacons setting in the phone app on at dusk and off at 3am. And another that turns the garden lights off after 10 min triggered by them being switched on
description: "" mode: single triggers: - value_template: >- {{ state_attr('sensor.phone1_beacon_monitor', 'b5b182c7-eab1-4988-aa99-bd9_1_2') != None }} trigger: template - value_template: >- {{ state_attr('sensor.phone2_beacon_monitor', 'b5b182c7-eab1-4988-aa99-bd9_1_2') != None }} trigger: template conditions: [] actions: - data: {} target: entity_id: - switch.garden_lights - switch.deck_light_table - switch.deck_light_bbq action: switch.turn_on - event: beaconDetected event_data: {} - if: - condition: numeric_state entity_id: zone.home below: 1 then: - data: {} target: device_id: - b5c12ce8343fda7810b69c24f - a71515f86d7d34ef570acbe8 action: light.turn_on
When you get back to that project: I used this project here. Mainly for myself tho.
You don’t need anything other than home assistant though, right? the companion apps already just do that
Well, I need a reverse proxy or VPN or something so that the phones can connect to my Home Assistant server from outside the LAN. That’s the main thing I haven’t gotten done yet.
ah. tailscale is great for that. I personally just leave my home assistant exposed behind a reverse proxy
Hauk
If you sacrifice freedom for security, then you deserve neither.
Patriot act, Snowden, Cambridge Analytica
we already done sacrificed freedom. This is the FO stage
If this was demanded of me, I would end the relationship immediately. That’s absolutely not worth it.
And what if you broke your leg and were lying in a ditch while chipmunks were eating your spleen, eh? How would anyone ever find you huh? Bet the egg is really on your face now!
Well then that’s just too bad for me, isn’t it?
Obviously I have my phone on me so I could just dial 911. If your phone breaks when whatever occurs to you, then your spouse or whatever isn’t going to be able to track your location and you’re not going to be able to call 911 either. So either way you’re fucked.
But what if a T-Rex swats your phone away but gets distracted trying to pick it up with his tiny arms, and forgets to eat you, huh? Bet you didn’t consider that likely scenario eh Buster Brown?
Don’t be silly, you’ll obviously have your hands full defending your spleen from chipmunks, no time to dial 911
i’d get those chipmunks some cheese.
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.
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.
That is entirely different than suspecting you of cheating every moment she doesn’t have eyes on you.
Some of the arguments for mutual tracking relate to safety, not cheating.
For real and there’s so many people in this thread who have only had toxic relationships or are in toxic relationships, projecting insecurities and lack of trust onto others who may not have these problems.
I don’t think this is a good idea for most people, but for some it makes sense and we need to remember that everyone is in different situations.
When you have a spouse that travels a lot, anxiety can get pretty high.
I think most do. Everybody here only looks at the “controlling, jealous partner” and never at the actually “loving, healthy, concerned partner”.
None of the arguments for sharing location relate to cheating. If you are worried your partner is cheating, nothing will assuage your concerns, that is a you and them problem. I don’t think for one second my wife would cheat on me, and not because I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread or anything, she’s just a good, honest person, and when we have things come up in our relationship she talks to me.
There was no need for you to re-state my point.
Are you ok?
Sure, then maybe enable it before those rides and disable afterward, and send her a text when you’d like her to keep an eye on it.
Keeping it on all the time has tons of potential privacy-related problems since phones a aren’t perfect.
Meh. My location sharing makes no difference to who I DONT want to see my location, your always being watched if u have a smart phone anyways 🤷 turning it on and off is too much effort to be bothered, I got nothing to hide from her.
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
My SO gets super jealous/anxious, probably because of all the horror stories in the news. Having access to my location would only make that worse, because then every time I drop a coworker off at home or something and forget to tell my SO, they’ll get super suspicious.
I’d much rather work off trust than need to explain every little deviation from my normal schedule just to avoid some anxiety.
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.
I can’t believe the number of people in here with paranoia and shitty relationships that can’t communicate with their “partner”
If you have to use these things in a relationship, then you already have a problem.
“safety is certainly a big part of the appeal for many users – so I allow the app to alert him each time I reach my front door.” I’m finding that people are irrationally paranoid these days. They see random acts of violence in the news and think it might happen to them but its so statistically unlikely given these are already unlikely events and these people usually middle class people living in nice areas.
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.
the flight very long.
IIRC most accidents happen during take-off/landing.
Once you’re up there it’s chill.It doesn’t really matter how you measure it, number of flights, duration, distance traveled, etc… No matter which, air travel is by far the safest option. The only other that comes anywhere near is trains. Going by car is bad (though motorcycle is even worse), but so many are afraid of flying that they instead takes the car. Which is among the worst things you could do from a safety point of view.
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.
Location sharing doesn’t prevent any of that though?
Like, no criminal who would want to rape/murder/abduct you knows whether you are sharing your location with anyone. They would do so regardless before anyone can arrive to help you.
Also, no kidnapper on this planet is stupid enough to take your phone with them. You have a slightly higher chance for authorities to be alerted sooner but that’s about it.
Oh yeah, location sharing will have almost no effect those risks. Totally agree.
Just disagreeing that low probability of occurrence automatically means the risk assessment should be low.
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.
