 all of which is outlined in my earlier article.
But now on to Family Location sharing. I know I know, based on comments I receive daily on other articles, some people are going to say, “That’s spying! Don’t stalk your kids’ every move!” And some might say “gee, now my spouse can track my whereabouts, I don’t think I like that very much”. These are valid points and certainly something to think about before using this feature. Whether you want to use it will certainly be based on your parenting style, how old your children are, whether they are out of the home without you for long periods of time, and whether they are driving.
As mentioned in a comment left on another post recently, “Trust is earned…but verified.” (Thanks Bonus Dad). Using family sharing and location sharing doesn’t mean I don’t trust my daughter; it’s just convenient to know I can verify her whereabouts if needed.
(These instructions have been updated to reflect how things work in iOS 13).
Then Enable “Share My Location” – go to Settings> Your Name > Find My, select “Share My Location”. If you have more than one device that uses your Apple ID, you can choose which device (for example, iPhone or iPad).
Now that you’ve enabled location sharing, family members (those you’ve added in step 1) can view your location from Messages or from the “Find My” app. Make sure all family members have accepted your invitation and have turned on their location sharing as well.
You can now use iMessage to view a family member’s location. Select a recent iMessage from a family member, select their name at the top under their photo and then click “info”. If this person has turned on their location sharing, you’ll see their location on a map.
Tip: you can also share your location with someone who is NOT in your family, just by clicking Send My Current Location, or Share My Location. You can choose how long they can view your location…use this one judiciously if not a close friend!
Prior to iOS 13, you would first have to download “Find My Friends” from the app store. Starting with iOS 13, “Find My Phone” and “Find My Friends” have been combined into one app called “Find My”. This comes with iOS 13 so there is nothing to download.
You’ll see each family member’s location on a map as long as their device is turned on and connected to Wi-Fi or 3G/4G.
Once you see your family member on a map, select their name for more options. You can bring up their contact information, get directions to their current location, and set up Notifications.
Edit a Location name for a specific location, such as “Home” or “School”. This makes it easier to quickly set up notifications in the future, such as “Notify me when Chippy arrives at School”.
Sure! If you want to disable Location Sharing, just go back to Settings > Your Name > Find My, and turn the feature off.
With iOS 13, the consolidated “Find My” app makes keeping track of your family’s location easy, with no additional programs to download. For previous versions of iOS, you can still use Family Sharing with “Find My Friends” to keep track of your family’s whereabouts.
Apple in iOS 13 and iPadOS merged the Find My Friends and the Find My iPhone apps into one app that’s just called “Find My,” because, well, it’s used for finding whatever you need to find.
Find My works similarly to the Find My ‌iPhone‌ and Find My Friends apps that were previously available, but it has a nifty new feature that’s designed to let you find your lost devices even when you don’t have a WiFi or LTE connection.
The Find My app is organized into three sections, accessible by tapping the tabs at the bottom. On the left, you can find people, in the middle, you can find your own devices, and on the right, there’s a “Me” tab introduced during the beta testing process.
As with the prior Find My ‌iPhone‌ app, all of your Apple products are listed. Devices where you’re signed into iCloud and have the Find My feature enabled are locatable through the Find My app.
All of your devices are displayed on a map, and you can zoom in or out to get a better picture of their location. Tapping on a single device provides you with options to get directions to its location in Apple Maps, Play a Sound for locating a nearby lost device, or get a notification when it’s found if it’s offline.
There’s an option to mark a device as lost, which locks the lost device, disables Apple Pay, and allows contact information to be put right on the lock screen, and as a last resort, there’s a tool for deleting all of your data.
If you have Family Sharing enabled, all of your family’s devices are listed in Find My right alongside your own, so you can also find devices from your partner or children through the Find My app.
The Find My app allows you to locate friends and family members that have shared their location with you. You can view their location using the “People” tab within the Find My app.
The Find My app lists people who have shared their location with you and, if you haven’t shared your own location, offers up an option to do so.
You’ll also find tools for removing friends and turning off your own location sharing with the person if it’s a mutual location sharing contact. You can opt to share your own location permanently, for an hour, or until the end of the day.
For any person who’s sharing a location with you, you can turn on notifications to get notifications when they leave or arrive at a specific location. There’s also an option to notify your friend when you leave or arrive at a specific notification.
The “Me” tab in the Find My app displays your current location and includes toggles for sharing location, allowing friend requests, choosing who to receive location updates from, and naming a specific place.
When your lost device is offline but close to another device, it’s able to connect to that other device over Bluetooth and relay its location. That means that your devices are more trackable than ever, and there’s a better chance you can find a device that’s been lost.
You’re not going to notice a difference in the Find My app when tracking a device over Bluetooth rather than a cellular or WiFi connection — it simply shows up in the list of devices like any other device that does have a standard connection. Offline devices do have their distance from you listed in gray instead of blue, and you can tell when the location data was last updated by the time listed.
Offline Finding is enabled on your devices by default, but you can disable it in the Settings app. Open up Settings, tap on “Find My,” select “Find My ‌iPhone‌” and then choose the “Enable Offline Finding” option.
Basically, it’s been designed with an encryption system that prevents people from abusing the feature for doing things like tracking you. That encryption system makes your personal location unavailable to people aiming to intercept your device’s Bluetooth signal and from Apple itself.
To decrypt that location signal, you need a second Apple device logged in with your Apple ID credentials and protected with two-factor authentication. Essentially, only your own devices can decrypt the encrypted location signal that’s being sent from a lost device, no one, not even Apple, can intercept it and locate you or your devices.
In this situation, a flight attendant or an airport worker with an ‌iPhone‌ might come across it. The flight attendant’s own ‌iPhone‌ would connect to your lost ‌iPhone‌ over Bluetooth by picking up your public key.
The flight attendant’s ‌iPhone‌ would then upload your device’s encrypted location and a hash of your public key (for identification purposes) to Apple’s servers, where one of your own devices can receive the encrypted info and decrypt it to make the offline device able to be tracked.
Because the entire Find My system is end-to-end encrypted, other people can’t get the location of your devices using Bluetooth, nor can Apple. Lost devices are trackable only by you.
According to Apple, Find My’s background Bluetooth location tracking feature uses just tiny bits of data piggybacked on existing network traffic so there’s no impact on device battery life, data usage, or privacy.
To help a friend find a lost device, you can tap on the “Help a Friend” option under the “Me” tab. This opens up iCloud.com on the web, where a friend can sign into their account using ‌iCloud‌. There is no option to sign out of Find My to let another person sign in like you could with Find My ‌iPhone‌.
Apple is working to expand Find My’s functionality through the introduction of a new hardware product that’s similar to the Tile Bluetooth item tracker.
Through a “Safe Locations” feature (such as home or work), users can set areas where notifications won’t be received, and when an item is lost in an unsafe location, it can be put into Lost Mode. In Lost Mode, the Apple Tag will take advantage of the new crowd-sourced tracking features in Find My.
When a person comes across an Apple Tag item that’s been put into Lost Mode, they will be able to see contact information for the item’s owner, and the owner of the item will receive an alert. There will be an augmented reality