Should you track your family’s location?

This story first appeared in Advisorator , Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up to get more insights every Tuesday. On a recent evening, I had a mild panic after trying to call my wife and repeatedly getting the same error: “Your call could not be completed as dialed.” She was supposed to come home late that night from an out-of-town trip with some old friends, but I hadn’t heard from her that day and couldn’t recall the timing of her flight. If her phone was merely in Airplane mode, my calls should have gone to voicemail instead of failing to connect outright. In the end, it was just a random network connectivity glitch, solved by a reboot after my wife got off the plane. But as a member of the in-law family group chat was quick to point out, I could have avoided this brief feeling of unease by simply tracking my wife’s location through her phone. Of course, I’m well aware of the location-sharing features that smartphones offer. Apple and Google both make it easy to let friends and family track your whereabouts, which in turn gives those companies valuable location data (and, in Apple’s case, reinforces the social pressure to have an iPhone ). My wife and I have just never wanted to track each other this way, having agreed that it’d be creepy for either of us to do so. This weekend’s travel blip did not change our minds. Part of the problem is that to enable these features, your phone’s mapping app must check your location constantly, not just when you’re looking up a business or getting directions. But the bigger concern is simply about personal privacy, and being able to go somewhere without it becoming anyone else’s business—even people you know and trust. I can see the other side of the argument: You’d regret not having this feature when you really need it, and it’s not like you have anything to hide. True, but that’s always the kind of argument tech companies use when a product erodes personal freedoms. As a result, you can no longer walk down the street without being monitored through neighbors’ doorbell cams , and pretty soon you might be recorded by anyone wearing a pair of sunglasses . Meanwhile, the entire ad-supported tech economy revolves around being so invasive that it feels like your phone is recording you , which it turns out people find unsettling even when they’ve done nothing wrong. While I can’t control those larger dynamics, I can at least second-guess whether my own fears justify yet another layer of surveillance. No judgment if you come to a different conclusion, but I’m not ready to make that leap even after some momentary nervousness. (Ask me again about this in couple years, though, when my kids have smartphones and are old enough to get into actual trouble.) How to see who’s tracking your location Location sharing between iPhone users: To find out who can see your location,...

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