The dark side of tracking your partner’s mobile phone

Does loving someone mean knowing everything about them? Obviously, you need some information, ideally what they do for a living, the names of their family members... their birthday. But what about their whereabouts? Do you need to know where your partner is at all times? Do you need to be able to see exactly when they arrive somewhere – and exactly when they leave?

Only a few years ago, tracking apps sounded like something out of a dystopian BBC drama, but today they’re fairly commonplace. A 2019 survey found that 40 per cent of parents and guardians in the UK use GPS tracking for their children on a daily basis. For friends, it can be an expression of affection and concern. As of now, I’m currently tracking 10 friends (and my mother) on the “Find My” app on my iPhone. But tracking your partner is somewhat different.

Ostensibly, it’s a good idea. From a practical point of view, you can see when they’re running late for dinner. You can check if they got to their hotel safely when travelling for work, if they landed on time, and so on. Put simply, you have the safety of knowing that if something happened to your loved one, at least you’d be able to see where they were.

“My partner and I have recently started sharing our locations on Find My Friends and can say for certain that we use it mostly for convenience,” says Milly*, 30. “Usually, we’re checking if one of us is home from work or back from a night out. I personally like knowing that he has my location for safety reasons. Also, if we’re trying to meet one another out somewhere, it’s an easy way to gauge timings.”

All this makes sense. And if you’re using the apps in this way, it can be entirely harmless. Useful, even, not just for mundane practicalities but for building a strong, honest foundation in your relationship. “For us, it’s not about spying on each other to see if we’re being faithful,” says Grace, 30, who uses a tracking app with her husband first and foremost for safety. “It’s also a sign of respect for each other. We know that we would never cheat, but it’s just us showing that there’s nothing to hide or question.”

There are other, more unexpected benefits, too. “We also use it to surprise each other,” adds Grace. “For example, if one of us is planning a surprise romantic dinner, we want to know how close the other is, so we know when to place the meal on the table or light the candles.”

In many cases, tracking apps just provide peace of mind. “Living in Los Angeles, we are keenly aware of potential weather hazards like earthquakes and potential crime,” says Nicole, 40. “We also deal with heavy traffic where we live, and sometimes I’d start to wonder if my husband was OK on his drive back from work because it was taking longer than usual. Finally, we decided to put a tracker on so I could just track his drive home and not worry.”

Occasionally, location tracking can even be lifesaving. Take Meg, 21, who’d been dating James, 22, for a year when they decided to start tracking one another using Life360, a San Francisco-based company that is one of the most popular global tracking apps, with roughly 70 million monthly users. One night, Meg woke up at 2am to a phone call from James telling her he’d been in a car accident. “His phone was dying and he couldn’t describe his exact location to me as there were no streetlights or houses,” she says. “He was literally in the middle of nowhere.”

It was thanks to the tracking app that she was able to find him. “I found his car upside down in a ditch off the road,” she says. Without Life360, he would’ve been trapped in the car for hours.

It’s not hard, then, to see why tracking apps are becoming more popular among couples – but depending on the health of your relationship, it’s equally easy to see how this consistent form of safety-informed surveillance could slip into something more toxic, eliciting paranoia and mistrust from a partner.

Georgina Sturmer, counsellor

“The risk is that we might feel as if our partner is trying to keep a watchful eye on us,” explains counsellor Georgina Sturmer. “This can breed a sense of suspicion or mistrust, particularly if you turn your location off, or leave your devices at home. It might make us feel worried about being spontaneous or doing something that our partner might disapprove of.”

Of course, location tracking can become a lot darker than this. Being able to watch and monitor your partner’s every move is, in a sense, normalising stalking tendencies. It’s technology that could easily be abused in the wrong hands – and can also create issues where previously there were none. It’s not hard to envisage how monitoring someone’s whereabouts for logistical reasons can teeter into dangerous obsession.

At the end of the day, it’s simply not normal to know where another person is at all times, regardless of your relationship with them. (It’s a sad testament to the dangers of today that tracking apps are even necessary for safety reasons.) But just like all of us can succumb to a harmless bit of social media stalking, perhaps as this technology becomes more mainstream, it’s only a matter of time until we normalise real-life, 24/7 location surveillance.

Often, it’s an ethically grey area. Similar to hacking into someone’s phone if you suspect them of cheating, you might be correct in the assumption – but it’s still an invasion of privacy, a boundary that probably shouldn’t have been crossed. It’s not only tracking apps that are raising these questions.

Consider Strava, the popular exercise app that allows users to share photos and chat about their various physical activities; it also shows people exactly where they happen to be doing those activities. Earlier this year, one woman from Savannah, Georgia, went viral on TikTok, claiming she discovered her military husband of four years had been cheating on her thanks to Strava.

“I studied his running map on the Strava workout app and realised that he ran past, paused around, or ended at an address where a fellow army girl lived,” McGee, 29, told the New York Post. “Their relationship had always given me a weird feeling and they were deployed together. Discovering these maps was the clue that confirmed my suspicions about their [romantic] relationship – and the rest is history.”

It’s a tricky balance to strike, particularly as tracking apps become increasingly mainstream, and the information they provide becomes even more precise. On Life360, for example, you can turn on alerts when someone leaves a particular address and receive a “weekly driver report” that shows you exactly where and when someone has driven somewhere.

In a healthy relationship, this might not necessarily be an issue. But in an unhealthy one, it can be a gateway to more problematic behaviour as this degree of surveillance becomes normalised. “Tracking our movements can also make us feel used to tracking and being tracked,” says Sturmer. “A next step might be for us to keep a closer eye on each other’s spending patterns, for example, which can leave us feeling defensive or trapped or controlled in some way.”

So, to track or not to track? Ultimately, it depends on the nature of your relationship. For some couples, location tracking can be a lifeline, while for others, it’s the beginning of disaster. Whichever path you choose, it’s best to tread it carefully – not least because you might be being watched as you do so.

*Name has been changed