First step - get a gf

Putting aside how much of a red flag that is,

Is there any foss self-hosted version of these location sharing services?

Man I took my kids off location sharing when they got their first phones at 12. Shit is creepy.

Just communicate!

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

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.

My wife and I have had our location shared with each other for years, but it's not a "Are they cheating?" thing. I have been married for 14 years and never wonder if my wife is cheating on me. It's just incredibly useful for seeing how far away one of us is from home to do things like plan dinner prep times, know where to look for a lost phone, etc. If you can't trust your SO, there is something wrong that you need to address and micro-managing where they are is toxic.

Also, do yourself a favor and use something open source and/or self hosted. Home Assistant, for example, has the ability to track location data for iOS and Android devices and pin that location to a map. Don't give your location data to corporations to be used for data mining.

Call me old fashioned, but I put it in the same bucket as a prenup: If you're always prepping your heart and mind for a split, you'll always have one foot out the door. Not everyone will agree with me, but that's how I feel and it's why I don't have one. Find yourself someone who is ride or die, if you are looking for a lifetime partner. Don't settle for someone you can't trust with your life.

That said, not everyone is looking for monogamy for the rest of their life, either, and that's OK, too.

You'll never be able to stop someone that wants to cheat. Best you can do is be funner and sexier than anyone else your partner might be around. Never understood why that's so hard for some people.

Lol. I keep telling my partner that I’m sharing my location data with her so don’t need to worry where I might be (Im pretty bad at reporting home unfortunately)

My wife and I have each other's locations. We trust each other. We just like having that information available. It's really not that hard to understand.

If you just see this and, like 20 others, blindly say "you should trust your partner" then you haven't thought about it at all. If you trust your partner completely, then you trust them to use your location information responsibly, right? So trust does not have any bearing on whether to use it or not.

The issue for me is that we should try to avoid normalising behaviour which enables coercive control in relationships, even if it is practical. That means that even if you trust your partner not to spy on your every move and use the information against you, you shouldn't enable it because it makes it harder for everyone who can't trust their partner to that extent to justify not using it.

On a more practical level, controlling behaviour doesn't always manifest straight away. What's safe now may not be safe in two years, and if it does start ramping up later, it may be much, much harder to back out of agreements made today which end up impacting your safety.

This is a huge no from me. My SO doesn't need my location, and sharing it has a lot of potential downsides, like:

• phone manufacturer selling it to advertisers
• gov't getting it and I accidentally trust trigger some alarm
• data getting exposed in a breach
• apps without location access getting it through some means

There's a lot of potential downside and the upside is... my SO knows when I'm almost home?

Yeah, no. Maybe I'll share if I'm doing something risky like hiking alone, but that's never staying on constantly.