Share My Location: Intimacy in the Age of Surveillance [9780228031802]

Overview

Perhaps you have casually checked a relative’s location by phone – not because anything is wrong, but because it is comforting to know where they are. The most consequential surveillance in our daily lives is not undertaken by a state or corporation; it is the voluntary monitoring we invite from the people who love us.

In Share My Location Mathias Klang shows how monitoring weaves itself into intimate life before we can consent to it and remains there long after we stop noticing it. Drawing on feminist care ethics and surveillance studies, and moving beyond Michel Foucault’s panopticon to explain a world in which people seek out rather than fear the gaze, he traces how people in high-income Western societies move through overlapping surveillance microcosms across the lifecycle, from baby monitors and location-sharing apps to fitness trackers and elder-care sensors. While conventional surveillance typically serves security interests, Klang argues that these microcosms normalize monitoring as benign, integral to care and love – even a condition of both. The book asks what happens to trust and autonomy when care and control become indistinguishable and when technologies that promise safety also enable stalking and abuse.

Written for anyone who has checked a partner’s location, a child’s phone, or their own step count, Share My Location reframes an everyday habit as a defining feature of modern intimacy and asks what we lose when surveillance feels more like freedom than compulsion.