Send Me Your Location: When Care Becomes Surveillance

The first time he asked her to share her location, she thought it was romantic. She was driving alone at night through a part of the country she didn't know, the weather had turned, and he stayed up until her little blue dot stopped at the hotel.

If the story had ended there, I would never have found it in the folder.

Four lines and a gap

The page was a handwritten timeline in blue ink. A taxi home after dinner. A work trip. A visit somewhere he considered unsafe. Then a gap. At some point the sharing stopped being for a journey and became permanent, and neither of them could later say when that was decided. At the bottom, in red: I don't remember agreeing that he could always know where I am.

I'll call her Emma. She drives four or five hours a day for work, and her company van reports its position to an office she has never visited. "Being tracked was ordinary," she told me. The difference, she said, was that the office watching her van never claimed to love her, and she was never expected to be grateful to it.

Forty minutes in a car park

Her partner, whom I'll call Daniel, was attentive. He remembered names, rang after bad days and noticed her moods before she explained them. "Don't turn it into something sinister," she said. "He cared about me."

The first moment it felt wrong was a Saturday. She left her phone in the car while shopping and came back to missed calls. Then he asked why her location showed her in a car park for forty minutes. Every fact in the question was innocent. "I remember thinking, why am I explaining forty minutes of my Saturday?"

After that the map entered conversations sideways. The restaurant must have been good, you stayed late. Traffic must have been bad. Why did you stop at a bar when you said you were coming straight home?

"Because I worry about you"

One evening she switched most of her location sharing off after reading about privacy. He rang. "Turn it back on." No shouting. When she asked why, he said: "Because I worry about you."

That sentence is almost impossible to argue with, because refusing the request sounds like refusing the feeling. She turned it back on. "It cost me almost nothing," she said, and almost was doing a lot of work.

Daniel shared his location too, and she sometimes looked. "Now you see why this isn't the story you want," she told me. She was right. Nobody was a villain. They had built an expectation together, one small yes at a time, until saying no looked like a confession.

There was one more thing. Daniel had once found out a previous girlfriend was lying because her location didn't match her story. Checking had protected him once, so he learned that checking kept him safe. When Emma asked why he needed the map if he believed her, he said it made him feel better. "The map was his medication," she said, "and I was the prescription."

Questions worth asking

I share a location with my sister. We turned it on years ago for one night drive, and I've never turned it off. So I'm not against the feature. These are the questions I'd ask:

• When did you agree to share permanently, and could either of you turn it off without explaining?
• Does information from the map come up in arguments?
• If your partner said where they were, would you still check?
• Is the sharing for a journey, or for someone's anxiety?

A location can tell you where someone is. It can't tell you what they feel, or whether they'll be faithful when you can't see them. I've written about other quiet forms of control in Quit Your Job, I'll Take Care of You. Emma's story is chapter thirteen of Become My Papi. More about the book in Become My Papi: The Book Behind the Investigation.

Questions people ask

Is location sharing in a relationship a red flag?

Not on its own. It becomes a problem when it is permanent by default, when the map is used in arguments, or when switching it off has to be justified.

Why do partners want to track each other's location?

Often from care or anxiety. In the story in Become My Papi, checking had once exposed a lie, so the partner learned that checking felt safe.

How do you talk about turning location sharing off?

Separate the feature from trust. Agree when sharing is useful, such as long drives, and agree that switching it off does not need an explanation.