Apple, who has the most popular tracking app, describes their “Find My Friends” app as “with Find My Friends you can easily locate your friends and family from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or on iCloud.com.” Not a harmless statement in any way, but there are so many things with this app that promote manipulative and controlling behavior. The biggest counter argument I will receive with this is, “well you have to allow certain people to be able to locate you.” Yes, I know this, but how easy is it for your abusive significant other, or over protective parents to sneak onto your phone and allow themselves to follow you, or force you to allow yourself to be followed through threats of leaving you or grounding you? Quite easy in my eyes. It’s a huge privacy concern and if your significant other or parents feel the need to force you to allow them to track your location, they really need to work on some of their trust issues. There is a very fine line between wanting to keep your significant other/child safe, and stalking their every move with the ever popular location apps. Some apps, like Foursquare, give you the option to share your location, while Apple’s Find My Friends, constantly shares your location the whole entire time the app is turned on. This app’s original intent is to make it easier to meet up with friends and family, when in all reality it is used to validate suspicions of lies. According to Huffington Post, one couple divorced over this matter. The husband believed his wife was having an affair with someone who lives uptown and secretly turned on Find My Friends on her phone. When he looked at her location in the following weeks, and saw she was uptown, he asked where she was. Not wanting to be caught lead her to say “downtown”, and the husband sent her screenshots of her location and said he’d meet her at the lawyer’s office with divorce papers in the following weeks! Of course the wife shouldn’t be having an affair (that’s a whole other topic), but how manipulative and emotionally abusive is it to secretly install a location app on a significant other’s phone and stalk their locations because there is a suspicion of lies? Not only with romantic relationships does this happen. Parents force their children to accept their request to follow them or they will lose their phone, car, allowance and so on. These parents will stalk their child’s location, or even get updates on where their child is. This just gives the child a sense of untrustworthiness, and unwillingness to tell their parents anything about their life because their parents are already invading the privacy of their child by tracking their every move. There is a very fine line between being protective of your child’s well being and being crazy overprotective, and relinquishing all of their trust in you. As a parent, it is your job to raise them to be honest, to make their own decisions, and be their own person. NOT to stalk their every move and squash all of their freedom and their trust in you. Find my Friends and other location apps are ruining all trust we as humans have in each other. It promotes abusive relationships, and shows whoever is being forcibly tracked that they have no right to privacy in their life. So please, before you secretly install these apps on your lover’s phone, or force your child to allow you to see their location, think about the emotional damage you are causing them.