Only you can set this, and only for yourself.
Pausing always lasts one hour, then sharing comes back on by itself. Everyone still sees you on the map, greyed out and labelled — not blank, because a blank dot looks the same as a flat battery.
What pausing does and doesn’t do. It stops your location being recorded. The OwnTracks app keeps sending until you pause it there too — those reports are thrown away unread. To stop your phone sending at all, set OwnTracks’ monitoring mode to Quiet.
Only while you want it. Holding the screen on is the most expensive thing this app can do to your battery.
Pick yourself if you’re already here — that’s how a new phone picks up where the old one left off.
Used for one thing: if somebody presses SOS, everyone who has given an address gets emailed straight away. Arrivals and check-ins are never emailed — they wait in the app until you look.
This is a shared map for one household. Everybody on it sees everybody else — there is no way to watch without being watched.
Where you are, how accurate that is, how fast you’re moving, your battery level, and the time.
Everyone in this household.
A Google Sheet belonging to whoever set this up. No company runs it. There is no account and no password.
30 days, then it’s deleted automatically.
Pause whenever you like. Leave whenever you like, and your history goes with you.
No web page on any phone can report where it is once you close it — that’s a rule of the phone, not a missing feature here. A proper app can, so this uses one: OwnTracks, free and open source.
It sends only to the address below. It has no account, no company behind it and nowhere else to send anything. And because it’s a normal app with its own icon and its own permanent notice, nobody can hide it on your phone.
On an iPhone this works best from Safari rather than the installed app. If nothing happens, use the QR code.
Point the other phone’s camera at this. Turn your brightness up.
Do these or it will quietly stop working.
iPhone — Settings › Privacy › Location Services › OwnTracks › Always, and Precise Location: On. iOS asks again days later; tap Always allow.
Android — Settings › Apps › OwnTracks › Permissions › Location › Allow all the time, and Battery › Unrestricted. Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo and Huawei each add another switch — see dontkillmyapp.com.