It's weird to track your boyfriend on your phone
Published 5 Oct 2025, Swedish daily Expressen, Cultural pages, in Swedish
This week, Instagram launched a new controversial feature that lets users monitor each other.
Victor Malm sees a Chinese norm spreading through generations of Swedes.
Through a younger colleague, I have learned that advanced surveillance in close relationships is no longer considered completely moronic, but natural.
Strange is the one who allows his partner a private life.
This has been described in this week's newspapers. And on Friday, Instagram launched a feature – the live map – that stealthily introduces this Chinese-police approach to everyday life for a cross-generational audience. Among parents and their now adult children, it has, oddly enough, long been the norm.
Guys have an app where they can follow their girlfriends like a dot on a map. You know if your friends are at work or the library, if they are taking a walk in the city or going for a run. Parents monitor their children well into high school age. In some cases, they also apparently have insight into what messages their adult residents are sending to others. This is, of course, disturbed. But technological possibilities have a tendency to become social demands.
Suddenly, anyone who does not monitor their children on their phones is irresponsible, and men who prefer not to be tracked 24/7 by a GPS probably have an infidelity or two to hide.
In one of the most politically influential books of recent years, Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation," the social psychologist shows that there is a strong correlation between three things: the rising mental health among young people, the increased use of phones, and the increasingly circumscribed physical and social freedom in the lives of modern children. Parents have better control and more control, not only through monitoring but through constant presence; the free play of my childhood in the 1990s – when I would disappear for hours in some field and my mother would be worried and angry when I came home – hardly exists today.
Earlier this year, Haidt, together with two research colleagues, presented interesting new data in The Atlantic: Children don’t want to waste their lives in front of screens. They want to be free. And they can only do that online.
According to the researchers, a majority of American children aged 8-12 are allowed to move around completely unsupervised on the internet, for example the immensely popular, deeply dystopian pedophile trap Roblox, but are at the same time forbidden from playing outside by themselves.
No, of course. The USA is not Sweden. Here, children are somewhat freer. But the difference between reality and the phone has the same character: children are extremely careful in physical reality, but are allowed to roam freely on an internet that is – in fact – more dangerous. It is not just fun games and friends. It is also death Nazism, beheading films and nihilistic chat room cultures that groom children and exploit them sexually. In comparison, the local playground is risk-free. And there are other, normal adults nearby, even if you are at home frying pancakes.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has become a leading voice in the fight to reclaim childhood from the power of phones.
Not mentioned are the obvious advantages that outdoor play on your own has compared to a sedentary phone life: good fitness, the ability to take care of yourself, build your own relationships and create your own context.
What you get are children who do not become adults.
The same applies to the advanced relationship monitoring among sexually mature people. They call it security and trust, but in reality it is a sad way of making us less human, a rather terrible intervention in the soul.
If we are not allowed lies and secrets, we are, forever, locked into a single identity, which can never change. It is by lying and hiding things that we can reinvent ourselves, time after time becoming different. Leave everything, land in Berlin when the family thinks you should fly to Copenhagen, start over, write a different story about who you are and open your life anew. That freedom must be defended and affirmed, also in the form of a fantasy of a responsible parent of young children on the couch after three beers on a boring Friday.
Transparency, on the other hand, is captivity.
Ask the Chinese.