The most intimate three little words you can hear from a romantic partner in 2024? Not those three, the infamous three, but maybe these new ones: "Let's share locations." Meaning your cell phone will continuously track your partner's whereabouts, appearing on a digital map as a tiny moving dot, and vice versa. A modern day homing device, a satellite-fed tracking beacon—but voluntary, and wrapped up in a convenient phone app.

Apple's Find My feature trickled into the mainstream first in 2009 as a way to locate a lost iPhone, then eventually as an opt-in friend-finder in 2011. Google has its own version for Android. Tracking of every kind has flourished in the last decade; stalkers and abusers found off-brand third party apps to track unsuspecting targets, and we all started to realize how often our geolocation was harvested and sold for advertising purposes.

But in the age of surveillance, spouses and partners began to voluntarily track each other; in these couples, it went from something paranoid or slightly sci-fi to an everyday occurrence. Marc, a state auditor who lives in Seattle, uses an app called Live360 with his wife, Erika; mostly, they check each other's location to facilitate the running of the household. "It has become a last minute chance to tidy up or meet the other in the driveway to assist with bringing in groceries," Marc says. "I can see how if couples had trust or control issues this could be a problem. But for us it's just convenience."

When I polled my own Facebook friends about the practice, I heard only about the most mundane of contexts. One friend explained that she checks the tracker to see if it's time to pick her husband up at the light rail station. Another wrote, "It's an 'I see you are at Costco, I need more butter' kind of thing." Apparently Big Brother has done a lot for groceries.

Relationship psychotherapist Kate Stewart says that many forms of technology have complicated relationships. "Oh, my God, all of them," she says. "Definitely every single one of them." But tracking actually isn't a major topic with patients at the practice she owns, Modern Therapy Seattle. It can cause a rift, she says, perhaps when one partner feels "it kind of inhibits their independence or freedom." If someone has committed infidelity and offers up tracking as a guarantee they won't repeat the behavior, "it can cause some anxiety, confusion, things like that."

Seattle corporate director Spencer N. tracks his current partner of six years, but saw the dark side in a past relationship. "My ex had my location and it was exhausting," he says, because that boyfriend didn't trust he hadn't left his phone somewhere as a decoy. He would demand photos from Spencer to prove he was indeed with his phone, including snapshots of nearby clocks to guarantee the photo was recent. "All it did was make the relationship go sour faster," says Spencer. "You should not track someone if you're checking up on them."

Tracking apps can indeed be wrong, delayed, or purposefully circumvented—they note where a phone is located, not necessarily a person. But Spencer says that knowing that fact still helps a relationship. "It's a leash that's very breakable," he says, but if he was ever tempted in the moment to cheat, "I would have to jump through this hoop, and that hoop" to cover his tracks on the tracking app. That's enough to bring him to his senses. "You know the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other? It's that [second] one, saying 'snap out of it.'"

Not that the practice is necessarily the standard. In a Reddit post on a channel devoted to Millennials, a user posted a poll to ask if others tracked their spouses. The vast majority, 83 percent, said they did not. But even in that small sample size (under 300 responses), the motivation for tracking appears to be convenience, not control. Only 1 percent said they track "because of trust issues."

In fact, tracking non-romantic friends isn't unusual. In social circles across Seattle, people share their location in case of emergencies or just to facilitate hangs. Asking a kickball buddy or book club member to location-share isn't necessarily a creepy ask—it might be a sign of platonic affection.

Today, Spencer and his partner use tracking for the same kind of day-to-day logistics as many others; they're thinking of putting an AirTag on their dog so it's easy to see who's taken the pup to work or a friend's house on a given day. In their long-term relationship, they've learned that a confusing dot on the tracking map usually means technical issues, not surprising behavior. "We've learned to say that it's like all technology—it's mostly good but it can be wrong," he says. "So don't just, like, freak out."