It’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m pretty sure my girlfriend is dead.

She went out with friends after work to celebrate somebody's birthday. I opted to stay in and go to bed at a decent hour because I have work in the morning, and also because I am lame. But now I'm awake, staring at the little circular blip on my phone, waiting for it to move.

The blip is in Google Maps, which offers the ability to share your location with others. My girlfriend and I had been living together for about a year when she granted me indefinite access to her whereabouts. It seemed harmless, a “just in case” type thing. Since then, my app has kept track of her at all hours with what looks like a cartoon speech bubble—a circle with a small arrow poking out to indicate her exact location. Right now, it shows her stuck in an alleyway in downtown San Francisco. She hasn’t moved for over an hour. Her icon is grayed out. "Offline" it says.

Obviously, she has been murdered. And I'm at home, just lying there in my boxer briefs.

Being able to monitor someone’s whereabouts at all times hasn’t done my anxiety any favors.

People have been tracking other people for much longer than smartphones have existed, but modern technology makes it easier than ever. Dodgeball, a precursor to Foursquare, was founded in 2000 as an SMS-based tracking service; it let users broadcast their location to friends via text. Google gobbled up the company in 2005, then mutated it over the years until it became part of the company’s standard maps app in 2017. In the meantime, other apps such as Apple’s Find My Friends, Snapchat’s Snap Maps, and the borderline omniscient Life 360 all got in on the action. Location sharing has steadily wormed its way into our lives.

“Privacy is so overrated for a lot of people, so this is sometimes seen as a really nice way to not have to deal with loneliness, isolation,” says Brett Kennedy, a clinical psychologist who specializes in digital media and device addiction in Boulder, Colorado. “It allows you to be with the person and know where they’re at. When both people are consenting to it, it can be something playful and fun and a nice way to connect.”

If you set aside the many legitimate concerns about nigh-Orwellian privacy violations and the potential for domestic abuse, the central promise of location sharing is peace of mind. Just tap an icon and the app pops up to issue welcome assurance that someone you love isn’t dead at the bottom of a river. And if that person is in trouble, spotting something amiss about where they are could potentially help save their life.

But even using the technology as intended can go awry. “When you invite this technology to mediate your care relations of whatever kind, you’re also inviting it to do so through its own limited bandwidth, it’s own limited algorithms,” says Natasha Schüll, a professor of media culture and communication at NYU and author of the book Addiction by Design. “That doesn’t always have the contextual clues. It can only monitor certain things.”

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Personal Data

When my girlfriend and I went on our first date four years ago, she shared her location with her best friend, just in case I turned out to be an ax murderer. (I did not.) We’ve tracked each other at crowded festivals and used our location history to settle debates about what we did on a particular day months ago. I also check the map nearly every morning to make sure she gets to work OK.

It’s not like I set out to monitor someone’s whereabouts at all times. This technology came to me, slithering into my phone as a subfeature of other services. These days, I have no fewer than five apps that let me track and be tracked by others. Snapchat, once a standard bearer of ephemeral interactions, now wants me to show my contacts exactly where I am all the time. If I’m taking a Lyft or Uber, I can share my trip progress in-app. Whenever I drive up to visit family, my mom demands that I send her a Glympse, a real-time tracker that lets you share your ETA, route plan, and current travel speed. Any deviation from my scripted trajectory warrants a worried phone call or text message. When sharing my location, I’m constantly cognizant of the concern of whomever is watching me. (Hi mom!) By far, the most oft-repeated text I send now has become, “Not dead, just stopped for gas.”