Location-Sharing Apps Turn Family Worry Into Constant Surveillance
A Guardian columnist describes how location-tracking apps have created a form of «compassionate surveillance», allowing anxious parents to monitor loved ones in transit — and raising questions about consent, privacy and the psychological cost of constant awareness.
Location-sharing apps have quietly become a fixture of family life, turning the smartphone into a tool for what one commentator calls «compassionate surveillance». Writing in The Guardian, the author describes an almost compulsive need to track loved ones when they are travelling, whether by plane, train or car, and admits the habit is difficult to break even when the people being watched are fully capable adults.
The arrangement is largely consensual. The author's daughters, described as highly competent grownups, know that their movements are being followed. The same cannot be said for the author's mother, who has long since given up trying to understand location sharing and the wider «sorcery» of smartphone settings. The writer insists the monitoring is limited to moments of transit and does not extend to nights out or everyday social activity, a boundary the author acknowledges would otherwise be «weird — or weirder, anyway».
The emotional logic behind the behaviour is familiar to anyone who has waited for a message confirming a safe arrival. When a loved one gets into a car, the author reports, «I get the fear». What follows is a spiral of catastrophising: a small car on a big road, surrounded by a million other vehicles, buses and lorries. The more the mind dwells on what could go wrong, the more the imagination supplies a steady stream of grim possibilities. The technology does not create the anxiety, but it feeds it by offering a live feed of uncertainty rather than the clean ignorance of the past.
That tension sits at the heart of the piece. Location sharing promises reassurance, yet it can also sustain a low-level vigilance that never fully switches off. The author longs for the days when not knowing was simply the default, before a map on a screen made absence visible in real time. The result is a paradox: the same tool that calms a worried parent can also keep the worry alive, because there is always another leg of the journey to watch.
The column reflects a broader shift in how families use consumer technology. Features such as Find My, WhatsApp live location and family safety settings have normalised the idea that proximity can be maintained at a distance. For some users, that is a practical safety measure. For others, it becomes an emotional crutch, a way of managing the helplessness that comes with loving someone who is out of sight. The author is candid about the ambiguity, describing the habit as something that may not be good but is hard to resist.
Consent remains the crucial dividing line. Where family members have agreed to share their location, the practice can be framed as mutual care. Where they have not, or where they cannot easily understand the settings, the same behaviour looks less like concern and more like surveillance. The author's mother, unable to navigate the technology, illustrates how uneven that bargain can be, even within a single household.
The piece does not call for abandoning the apps. Instead, it captures a quieter unease: the sense that constant awareness may be changing the emotional texture of family life. The old ignorance the author misses was not indifference. It was simply the absence of a screen that could turn every journey into a test of nerve, and every arrival into a relief that must be checked rather than assumed.
