Location sharing- I think I’m worryingly in the minority

[PomPomHead]

I am seriously worried that I’m in the minority here and the world’s gone mad. Why would you share your location All The Time with every member of your family ( even, as in the case of my friends, with your
married 30 year old daughter!)? Why does nobody feel able to be independent and unwatched ? It baffles me and nobody has been able to persuade me of the so-called safety benefits?
Is checking your location now the new showing me you love me?

I have 4 DC, I have all their locations, it saves me constantly asking my teens where they are/what they're doing. I also have my mum. Mine is on for all of them too, I run and walk the dog alone quite a bit, so I like the comfort of knowing they can follow my last movements if anything were to happen to me.

I do feel like I'm very loosey goose with it, I check it when I need to, but not obsessive over it. A colleague checks her husband and kids allllllll day and will message her husband thigs like "ooh what ya getting from maccies", when she sees he's at McDonalds for example, which would drive me wild if someone did it to me.

None of my family do it either. I would just get anxious about (student) DD if I knew where she was every minute of every day.

Do you think I am not resilient at 47 if my nearly 80yo mum tracks me? She tracks me for her own comfort and convenience. She is elderly and ill.

I don't like it either & have only used it whilst on holiday abroad as my parents were interested in what I was up to.
It has it's place & I am not adverse to using it for specific reasons for a short period of time.
2 of my friends used to track each other which I found a bit weird.
One of those friends was quite controlling & is someone that I enjoy spending time with but in limited doses. The sort of friend that over analyses What's App message read times & when last online etc. Like fuck was I going to join in on that.
They subsequently had a falling out on holiday a few years back & haven't spoken since.

It was novel when it came out (google latitude) back in 2009. But since then I never used a constant location sharing service until recently.

Me and DP have find friends activated at the moment, but it was almost accidental. We started using some AirTags and while in the app I was explaining to DP how find friends works and he said “activate it if you want I don’t mind you seeing where I am” so I did. I know he never checks where I am, so I don’t feel watched. He didn’t ask me to share mine I chose to, and he’d be fine if I turned it off (translate as wouldn’t even notice 🤣)

He works out and about so it’s handy if I remember it’s active. Though tbh it’s not very good at refreshing anyway.

A better option to me is the timed location sharing on WhatsApp - you can share for up to 8 hours so good if someone is going on a long journey, or out hiking alone or whatever. Means someone always knows where you are in those circumstances and auto turns off after the time period elapses.

I'd have advised him to think about the reasons why I was tracking him. And if he thought about it and decided against tracking, then I would have said OK. But he's happy with it. I told him directly that I tracked him at night to make sure he was home safe. He thought it was nice. It's not something that impacts him, if I do a "find my" on his phone.

I recently found something that looked like some sort of fitness monitor device on the ground and picked it up to look, then put it in my pocket to put in with the electrical recycling because it looked like rubbish.

I then continued my day, returning home a couple of hours later.

Three days later I got home to find that it was a cat-tracker, and the owner of the cat who had lost it's tracker had tracked the device back to our house, and given my partner an A4 print-out showing my precise movements from the time I picked it up to arriving back at home (hence he knew we had his tracker!)

I didn't say anything to the man, but to be honest I am absolutely fuming that he handed over a record of my movements over a three hour period to my partner. Tracking people is really really creepy (but obviously I do get that for certain people, not least kids, or at certain times it makes sense with the full consent of all involved)

It’s your mum who’s not resilient in this case. Not all 80 year olds who are unwell feel the need to track their children’s whereabouts.

It does impact him. It impacts his ability to be an adult, knowing that mummy’s always got an eye out for him.

how do you know there is an overlap? it is pure conjecture.
same as the pp saying that we are saying kids need resiliance but the constant tracking doesn't help that. There is zero evidence that there is an overlap of people saying that.

Which is just what family is for.

And my 80yo mummy has got an eye out for me. Always. Because she's my mum.

It's for the times that people don't text to say they've got back safely though. Because sometimes people don't get back safely and may need some help.

Not allowing your children to grow up?

And if he ends up sleeping at lots of different places does he really want his mum to know that he is sleeping around?

When you grow up, as I believe I have at nearly 50, your family still have an eye out for you. My nearly 80yo mum will always have an eye out for me. My PILs had an eye out for me and DH until they died. So DH's parents are dead and he's nearly 50 with adult children, dog etc. Is he not grown up?

It's all over this thread for one thing...

FFS: It isn't the same people saying those things is it?

The only person in my family to share location with me is my oldest DS who is the first of my children to recieve a phone - he likes to go out and explore. I've made it clear I look at his location to know where he is roughly and when he's returning so I know to put his food on. He's fine with it... I think its because I've never been concerned about his whereabouts and I trust him. I'd never ask for my partners location in a million years!

Tracking others movements goes beyond having an eye out.

That's my point though. It is often the same people saying both those things.

So if he'd have said no, he didn't want to, you'd have tried the emotional guilt trip route to try and get him to comply?!
Seriously....
Not making a compelling case for tracking people here, just showing how it makes controlling and unhealthy behaviour worse and just feeds it.

show me, in this thread.
Because it is just conjecture, and plainly not actually likely to be true.

ETA: in fact, don't bother. I am off to work now.

He doesn't sleep around.

You think me asking him to think about why I'm tracking is emotional guilt? It's just not. It's asking him to think logically about facts and draw a conclusion.