Every relationship has its disagreements. Who takes out the trash and washes the dishes? Who plans the meals and writes out the grocery list? And when is it okay to start tracking one another’s location?  

Location sharing is becoming the norm between romantic partners—50% of people valued location sharing in their relationships, according to recent research from Malwarebytes—and plenty of couples have found ways to track one another’s location, with consent, in a respectful and transparent way.

But, as a cybersecurity, privacy, and identity protection company, Malwarebytes is concerned with risk, and location sharing carries significant risks within many types of relationships.

There are new relationships in which the rules around privacy and sharing are still being agreed upon, old relationships in which power imbalances are deeply entrenched, and, of course, abusive relationships in which non-consensual tracking and surveillance are used as levers of control.

As a company—and not a relationship counselor—Malwarebytes cannot endorse any reasons for location sharing between romantic partners. But Malwarebytes can provide guidance on what safe location sharing looks like, including a requirement for consent.

Importantly, Malwarebytes can also remind readers about one simple, often-forgotten fact in this conversation: You don’t have to engage in location sharing if you do not want to.

It really is as simple as that. Do not agree to location sharing in your relationship if:

• You are being pressured, coerced, or harassed into sharing your location.
• You do not trust or feel comfortable sharing your location with your partner.  
• You do not want to.

As the reasons for location sharing are valid for many couples, the reasons against it are just as valid, too. You have the right to determine the rules in your own relationship, and that includes the digital decisions that impact your feelings of privacy, safety, and trust.

Safety, security, and convenience

According to research conducted last year by Malwarebytes, location tracking among partners is popular in North America—and even more popular amongst younger generations.

When polling more than 1,000 people about their attitudes and behaviors around online privacy and cybersecurity, a full 50% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “monitoring my spouse’s/significant other’s online activity and/or location makes me feel they are safer.”

Similarly, 42% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “being able to track my spouse’s/significant other’s location when they are away is extremely important to me.” This sentiment was higher amongst Gen Z—49% felt the same way compared to the general population.

As to why location tracking has become so popular, there is little doubt. It’s about safety (or, at least, the feeling of it).

On Reddit, the question of location tracking between partners is frequently posed and is just as frequently answered: “I think it should be fine for safety reasons,” said one user in a the most popular response to a thread.

In writing for the media platform Her Campus, one Pennsylvania State University student said that, if she already shares her location with her friends for safety, “why would I not share it with someone I am involved with romantically?”

For some of the editorial staff at the healthy living brand Poosh, location sharing also provided convenience.  

“If I want to call my boyfriend for something, sometimes I’ll check his location first (if he’s at the office, for example, I won’t call),” wrote Erika Harwood, managing editor. “Or if he tells me he’s on his way home and it seems to be taking unusually long, it’s easier to just check his location and see if he’s stuck in traffic.”

Harwood continued:

“Basically, it all boils down to me trying to eliminate as many phone calls from my day as possible.”

What these explanations all share is purpose and consent. The people featured here have told their partners about location sharing, and they have identified specific reasons to engage in this practice. Because of this, these situations are hardly cause for alarm.

What Malwarebytes hopes to draw attention to, however, are starkly different situations.

Coercion, control, and crisis

Location “sharing” implies two partners who consensually share their locations with one another. But as Malwarebytes discovered last year, location “sharing” isn’t the only activity that some people engage in—it’s also location spying.

According to the same survey last year, 41% of all people admitted to monitoring their partner in some way without their partner’s permission.

That includes 16% of people who non-consensually “tracked my spouse’s/significant other’s location through an app or Bluetooth tracker (like Apple AirTags, Tile, Find My)” and 13% who non-consensually “installed monitoring software/apps on spouse’s/significant other’s devices (e.g., Life360).”

The harms here are obvious.

Non-consensual location tracking in a relationship is a clear invasion of privacy. It puts sensitive information into one partner’s hands without the other partner knowing it, and the nature of the information itself can be used to harass and stalk someone—especially after a breakup.

Non-consensual location tracking is also present in domestic abuse, particularly in instances where one partner is being spied upon with the use of “stalkerware” apps. And while those who deploy these types of invasive apps are not guaranteed to be physically abusive against their partners, several documented cases highlight the risk.

As Danielle Citron, professor of law at UVA, wrote back in 2015 about what she called “cyber stalking apps”:

“A woman fled her abuser who was living in Kansas. Because her abuser had installed a cyber stalking app on her phone, her abuser knew that she had moved to Elgin, Illinois. He tracked her to a shelter and then a friend’s home where he assaulted her and tried to strangle her. In another case, a woman tried to escape her abusive husband, but because he had installed a stalking app on her phone, he was able to track down her and her children. The man murdered his two children. In 2013, a California man, using a spyware app, tracked a woman to her friend’s house and assaulted her.”

These cases may sound extreme, but they should not be ignored. They reveal that it isn’t location sharing itself which is harmful, but rather that harmful relationships will lead to harmful forms of location tracking.

Be sure that, if you do engage in location sharing, it is with someone who you trust, on both of your agreed terms, and in a way that you can turn off the location sharing at any point in the future.

What’s the answer?

Your real-time location is extraordinarily sensitive information, and as such, access to it should be understood as a privilege, not a right. No romantic partner has a “right” to your location just because their previous partners practiced location sharing. No romantic partner should coerce or harass you into location sharing. And no, the refusal to share your location, at any stage of the relationship, is not a “red flag.”

If you do decide to share your location with your partner, be sure to follow these guidelines:

• Have an open conversation about location sharing with one another. You must obtain consent from your partner if you’re going to share your locations. Spying on your partner’s location without their consent is a breach of trust.
• Have a reason why you’re engaging in location sharing. Many problems in a relationship will not be solved by location sharing. Have a firm reason why you want to share locations and what value it will provide. If you do not have a good reason, you may not need location sharing at all.
• Set up rules about location sharing. Location sharing can be enabled on a case-by-case basis for, say, music festivals, vacations, or solo hiking trips. It can also be enabled between partners indefinitely.
• Check in periodically about whether it is working. Just because you agreed to location sharing a year ago does not mean you cannot revisit the topic. See how location sharing feels and then see if you still want it later in your relationship.

As every couple has its own rules and behaviors for success, there is no single answer to whether you should share your location with your partner. You know your partner—and yourself—best to answer this question. Be safe, whatever option you choose.

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We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

In 2022, we published an article about how photographs of children taken by a stalkerware-type app were found exposed on the internet because of poor cybersecurity practices by the app vendor.

The stalkerware-type app involved, TheTruthSpy, has shown once again that the way in which it handles captured data shows no respect to its customers. And even less for the victims it’s monitoring.

TheTruthSpy markets itself as a tool that can be placed in the hands of employers who want to keep tabs on employees in the workplace, or in the hands of parents who want to look after their kids. But it can just as easily be placed in the hands of stalkers, abusive partners, or someone who just wants to get a leg up in their divorce proceedings.

Stalkerware-type applications like TheTruthSpy typically get installed secretly, by a person with access to the victim’s phone. For that reason, by design, the apps stay hidden from the device owner, while giving the attacker complete access.

Boasting “more than 15 spying features,” it can track a target’s location; reveal their browser history; record their calls; read their SMS messages; spy on their WhatsApp, Facebook, SnapChat and Viber messages; log what they type; and record what they say.

That alone is bad enough, but the app seems to have a persistent problem with security. In 2022, tech publication TechCrunch discovered that TheTruthSpy and other spyware apps share a common Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerability, CVE-2022-0732. The publications described the bug as “extremely easy to exploit, and grants unfettered remote access to all of the data collected from a victim’s Android device.”

The bug was never fixed, and yesterday, stalkerware researcher maia arson crimew, revealed that it was stumbled upon again by two different hacking groups.

When members of the two hacking groups looked into TruthSpy last december while searching for stalkerware to hack, they independently stumbled upon the same IDOR vulnerability

The good news is that both groups, SiegedSec and ByteMeCrew, said in a Telegram post that they are not publicly releasing the breached data, given its highly sensitive nature. They provided enough data to enable TechCrunch to verify that it is authentic though, by matching IMEI numbers (numbers that uniquely identify phones) and advertising IDs against a list of previous known-to-be compromised devices.

Which means that by installing TheTruthSpy—and a whole fleet of clone apps including Copy9, MxSpy, iSpyoo, SecondClone, TheSpyApp, ExactSpy, FoneTracker and GuestSpy—you are not just spying on someone, you are also potentially exposing their data for anyone to find.

The data reportedly shows that TheTruthSpy continues to actively spy on large clusters of victims across Europe, India, Indonesia, the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Sadly, this is no surprise. According to 2023 research from Malwarebytes, 62 percent of people in the United States and Canada admitted to monitoring their romantic partners online in one form or another, from looking through a spouse’s or significant other’s text messages, to tracking their location, to rifling through their search history, to even installing monitoring software onto their devices.

Removing stalkerware

If you want to know if your phone is or was infected with TheTruthSpy, you can use the lookup tool provided by TechCrunch, which has been updated to include information about the most recent leak.

Malwarebytes, as one of the founding members of the Coalition Against Stalkerware, makes it a priority to detect and remove stalkerware-type apps from your device. It is good to keep in mind however that by removing the stalkerware-type app you will alert the person spying on you that you know the app is there.

Because the apps install under a different name and hide themselves from the user, it can be hard to find and remove them. That is where Malwarebytes for Android can help you.

1. Open Malwarebytes for Android.
2. Open the app’s dashboard
3. Tap Scan now
4. It may take a few minutes to scan your device.

 If malware is detected you can act on it in the following ways:

• Uninstall. The threat will be deleted from your device.
• Ignore Always. The file detection will be added to the Allow List, and excluded from future scans. Legitimate files are sometimes detected as malware. We recommend reviewing scan results and adding files to Ignore Always that you know are safe and want to keep.
• Ignore Once: A file has been detected as a threat, but you are not sure whether to add it to your Allow List or delete. This option will ignore the detection this time only. It will be detected as malware on your next scan.

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We don’t just report on phone security—we provide it

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your mobile devices by downloading Malwarebytes for iOS, and Malwarebytes for Android today.