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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.
