Anyone not tracked via their phone?

[Bighouseinthecountry25]

As far as I know I can't be location tracked. DH and I can't track each other and I have Snapchat to keep an eye on my teens but I don't share my location. I don't have a particularly exciting life but I like to be under the radar. Surely I'm not the only one as it seems to be the norm. We all have androids as well so no fine my phone iPhone thing.

I quite like being tracked. Before we got a family Life360 subscription I was always being called or messaged asking where I was, when would I be home, can I pick someone up, can I provide a lift etc etc.

Now I don’t get any of those calls. My kids can see where I am, as can my DH, so no one bothers me!

We use it and like it. It's handy - I can see when my teen is on the move on a Friday night so I don't worry about whether she got her train or not. I can see that my husband is still at work so we don't have to hold supper for him, that sort of thing. If we didn't all like it we wouldn't use it, but I think it's rather lovely, actually. I like to think of my dad in his garden.

day to day no, but we both have life360 on and put it on and location services when we’re doing a big travel day in the car solo or out for a walk solo, we live rurally in the highlands and it’s nice to have a vague last seen in this location type thing, but we actively have to put it on and alllw location services

Re the issue of burner, I don't know. It's just an old phone with a payg sim in so I have a work phone number that is never used but means I don't have to give out my personal number. It's got work two step verification on it for my laptop and that's it.

Two dc me and dh can see each others locations. It’s reassuring and saves where are you can, you pick me up calls? DD is resistant. She’ll occasionally share her location if she’s getting a late uber. However she hypocritically can always see where I am and often comments. DS was sofa surfing for six months and I didn’t notice 🫣

Only when I'm travelling to see my kids and I'm near, so they can gauge when to leave to meet me at the train station 😉

I don't have anything that anyone can log into to see where I am, but I regularly share my location with DH for my drive home, or with others if I'm meeting up with them.

I have the "Find My" app to keep track of AirTags in our luggage on holiday and to find my earphones when I inevitably put them down somewhere "safe", but no-one can just log into an app and see where I am.

I can see the benefit to it when you've got teenagers (and I'd expect to share my own location with kids as well as vice versa), but for DH and I just as a childless couple? Absolutely no need IMO.

Those of you who say it saves the "can you pick me up calls/texts", how do you arrange this? I'm trying to imagine how knowing where someone is translates into "can you pick me up"? I could see myself as a teen being able to see that my mum was at home, but I don't know how you would then be able to turn that into a pick up, unless you either texted or telephoned? However, I don't use a tracker, so I may be missing some functionality it has.

The difference is that they don't know who it is that they are tracking.

With pay as you go phone there is no need to provide any name or address. You just need to top up the phone with £10 using any credit or debit card at all and you are good to go.

In case you are worried about a link between your credit card and your phone number then, with Tesco for example, you can buy a top-up voucher instore with cash.

So, yes, the phone itself can be tracked but that doesn't show who the person holding the phone is.

No, DH and I don’t share locations. We might do the temporary location share thing you can do over iMessage where you can pick “share my location for an hour” and it shows the other person a map. This is generally if we’re meeting somewhere non-specific (like “we’ll meet in town at midday”).

But we don’t have any constant background ability to track the other person.

That’s not a burner phone.

Do your work phones not track your? All ours do for security.

I have a smartphone and accept that I’m probably being tracked though I do have location switched off. As a family even when my sons were at uni or home we’ve never tracked each other. To me it’s akin to stalking and not normal and shows no respect for someone’s privacy. If you feel the need to track your partner, spouse etc to me it shows lack of trust

We use Life360 too, one of my teens is an absolute scatterbrain and goes between friends houses/sports centre without phoning me so it's easier to just check where she is before going to pick her up. My older teen likes the reassurance of us knowing when she reaches her intended destinations. We have no qualms about it, we're all pretty transparent with each other and have nothing to hide. We're all different though - each to their own!

Ex Dh was tracking. me, didn’t know until police found it. So no, nothing.

This. I don't track my family though, that's weird and I don't understand why people do that

My first reaction was to say ‘Yep I agree. I dint either’.
But actually that’s not true.
I use my phone as a satnav for example. I’ve used an app whilst in london for taxi. It has location on. Just as much as I have location off, there are apps where you cannot not have it.
Even just having a phone with internet and wifi on will mean you can be located just from connecting to the network.
I don’t feel particularly comfortable with that. But I’m not sure you can avoid it.

(It also means your burner phone … doesn’t really protect you either)

DH and I do not track each other and I find the whole concept a bit creepy. Like we are not allowed to be individual, independent people outside of the house. In general though I am quite sure my smartphone is being tracked.

I have tracking for my kids but tbh I rarely use it.

I don't have anything for me or DH, I sometimes think it would be handy when I'm expecting him home from work so I know when to put the dinner on or whatever, but I don't need that enough to even float the idea.

Having the ability to know where someone is is not the same as 'tracking' someone.

We don't track adults. Two of my friends do. I do track my round teens.

The one time I've used this and found it really useful was when my son was coming home from a school trip which was a 6 hour coach journey from Italy and the pick-up window from school was 'anytime between 9-11pm'.
He sent me his location for 8 hours on whatsapp and I could see him on the map crossing France, hanging around at Calais for an hour, arriving in Dover, heading through Kent etc etc.

It meant I could go about my evening and make dinner, have a bath etc then I could see when he was about a mile away from school and went to pick him up.

I was really looking forward to him coming home so it was really sweet seeing his smiley face on the map getting nearer and nearer!

We don’t track. There have been times when I would have found it useful to be able to track my teen though!

I was freaked out when my DD’s abusive boyfriend started tracking her with life 360, and it really made me think about how we are normalising this sort of surveillance.

Thanks @MeatRaffleRita I can see how in that instance tracking was handy. I'm still unclear how a teenager would arrange to be picked up by a parent, just by knowing where they were.

@Blimeyblighty DD told me how boyfriends / girlfriends at Uni used Snapmaps and FindMyFriends and those types of functionality to grill their partners as to there whereabouts. I thought it should a worrying increase in the normalisation of surveillance too in that generation.

When my son passed his test he was living outside Leeds. To come home to North Wales on the motorways was nerve-wracking at first so he and girlfriend shared the driving. They put Google tracking on their messenger account for me so I wouldn't worry as much. They don't use the car a lot the trains are so cheap into Leeds for work and universities. They still travel late evening to avoid problems.

We don't track eachother in this house but my other son and his wife do. Not sure why.

Yep, I've got a tracker for the dog, just in case, but I would never dream of being tracked myself or tracking another person!