Continuous location sharing between family members has become common within a few years, and adoption has substantially outpaced any evidence about its effects.
What evidence exists comes mostly from the broader literature on parental monitoring, which predates the technology and has some relevant findings.
What the monitoring research suggests
The finding discussed in the article on adolescent disclosure applies directly here.
Parental knowledge obtained through adolescent disclosure is associated with better outcomes. Knowledge obtained through control and surveillance shows weaker associations, and some studies find negative ones.
Studies of psychologically controlling parenting — which includes intrusive monitoring — find associations with poorer adolescent outcomes on several measures including internalising symptoms and autonomy development.
The mechanism proposed is that surveillance substitutes for the relationship in which disclosure occurs. If information arrives automatically, the conversation in which it would have been given does not happen, and the conversation was doing more than transmitting the information.
The developmental question
Adolescence involves developing the capacity to make decisions independently, which requires opportunities to make them.
A young person whose location is continuously known has fewer such opportunities, and the concern raised in the developmental literature is that autonomy is practised rather than granted at a threshold age.
There is a related concern about the transition. A person accustomed to continuous monitoring until eighteen, and then subject to none, has had no graduated practice at the judgement she suddenly requires.
This is theoretical rather than demonstrated — the technology is too new for outcome data — but it follows from reasonably well-established developmental findings.
The case in favour
It would be one-sided not to state it.
Location sharing has genuine safety utility in specific circumstances: travel in unfamiliar places, late journeys, medical conditions, situations where a young person may be unable to communicate.
Many adolescents report finding it reassuring rather than intrusive, particularly where it is reciprocal.
And it can function as an enabler rather than a restriction — some parents grant more freedom of movement because monitoring is available than they would otherwise, which is a genuine increase in autonomy rather than a decrease.
That last point is the strongest argument for it and depends entirely on whether it is used that way.
The distinction that matters
The research on control versus support suggests the relevant variable is not whether monitoring occurs but how it is arranged.
Monitoring that is mutual, agreed, transparent about its purpose, and used for the stated purpose behaves differently from monitoring that is unilateral, covert, or used to check up on things it was not agreed for.
The specific failure mode reported in qualitative research is monitoring that was justified on safety grounds being used for compliance checking — a parent confronting an adolescent about being somewhere she said she would not be. That converts a safety arrangement into a surveillance arrangement, and the adolescent's response is generally to defeat it.
Which is easily done. Adolescents share devices, leave phones in bags, disable services and use secondary devices. Monitoring that becomes adversarial stops producing accurate information almost immediately, which is a practical argument against adversarial use quite apart from the relational one.
Partner tracking
A separate and more concerning application.
Surveys of young people's relationships find location sharing between partners is common and that a meaningful proportion report feeling obliged to enable it.
Monitoring of a partner's location and communications appears in most frameworks for identifying coercive control, and the research on adolescent dating abuse consistently identifies it as a component.
The difficulty is that the same behaviour has an innocuous version, and adolescents frequently do not distinguish. The distinguishing question is whether it is genuinely optional — whether declining would produce a consequence.
This should be taught explicitly and generally is not. Safety education addressing stranger risk while not addressing partner monitoring is missing the more common experience.
A workable approach
Agree it rather than impose it, and be specific about what it is for.
Make it reciprocal. Adolescents' objection is frequently to the asymmetry rather than to the monitoring.
Use it for what was agreed and not for other things. A single confrontation about an unrelated matter ends the arrangement's usefulness.
Reduce it over time deliberately, so that the transition to independence is graduated rather than abrupt.
And teach the partner version explicitly — that being required to share location with a partner, where declining would cause a problem, is a recognised marker of controlling behaviour rather than a sign of closeness.