Your iPhone can be configured to share your location in real time with anyone. It also tags your location in the photos you take, and many apps ask for location access. Here’s how to take control.
Find my iphone
The Find My iPhone feature allows you to track your iPhone if you lose it. Anyone with access to your Apple ID account can access this feature, so it is important to create a unique password and ensure that other people do not have access to your account.
If you’ve set up Family Sharing, your family members can also track your iPhone’s location with the default settings. To track your iPhone, someone will need to use the “Find My” app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac or the “Find My” tool on Apple’s iCloud.com.
To control Find My iPhone, open the Settings app, tap its name at the top of the Settings screen, and tap “Find My.” You can control if Find My iPhone is enabled from here and also choose if your location is shared with the family members shown here.
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Sharing locations with people
You can also choose to share your location with others who are not in your household. For example, friends can share their locations with each other so they can get together more easily. This feature used to be called “Find My Friends”, but now both family and friend location swapping is included in the Find My Friends app.
To check if you have shared the location of your iPhone with someone, open the “Find me” application on your iPhone. Touch the “People” icon at the bottom of the window and look at the people in the list. Your family members will appear here, as will anyone with whom you have shared your location.
To remove a person from this list, swipe left and tap the red trash can icon.
Applications to which you have given the location
Applications that you have given location access to can also access your location. To see which apps have access to your location, go to Settings> Privacy> Location services.
Scroll through the list here to see which apps have access to your location. An app that “Always” has access to your location can access it even in the background, while apps set to “During Use” can only access your location while using them. You can also force the application to ask you every time you want to access the location.
There are good reasons why some apps always have access to your location, for example, a weather app might provide updated weather based on your current location, but you should be careful about the apps you give your location access to.
To change an app’s location permissions, touch it in the list here and choose a new option: Never, Ask next time, While using the app, or Always.
RELATED: How to make iPhone apps always request location access
Photos with location data
Many people don’t know it, but their photos can reveal their location.
Here’s how it works: When you take a photo, your camera automatically adds geographic data to the photo. So when you look at your photos in the future, you can see where you took a photo.
Some services automatically purge this location data from a photo when you upload it. However, not everyone does, and if you send a photo directly to someone via SMS, email, or some other method, that person is likely to be able to see the location data on your photo and determine where that photo was taken.
You can prevent the iPhone camera from saving location information in the photos you take. You can also delete location data while sharing a photo. From the Photos app, tap the Share button, tap “Options” at the top of the screen to share, and disable the “Location” option.
RELATED: How to see exactly where a photo was taken (and keep your location private)
Bluetooth tracking beacons
Nearby Bluetooth beacons can also be used to track you as you move. For example, they could be used to track shopper movements in a mall, gathering a large amount of data to target ads. Think carefully before giving Bluetooth access to apps that request it, as those apps could use it to track your phone’s location when near such beacons.
You can check which apps already have access to your phone’s Bluetooth radio by going to Settings> Privacy> Bluetooth.
RELATED: Why iPhone and iPad applications ask to use Bluetooth
Cell towers
Your cell phone operator can determine your approximate location. This works through triangulation: By measuring the relative signal strength of your phone at three different cell towers, your operator can get a pretty good idea of where your phone is in relation to all the towers. It’s similar to how GPS works, actually. If you are using a phone and have a cellular connection, there is no way around it.
Cell phone operators have been found to sell this location data to suspicious third-party companies, but they have promised to stop.
In 2020, the FCC proposed finding AT&T, Spring, Verizon, and T-Mobile more than $ 200 million to sell their customers’ locations.
RELATED: Can anyone really track the precise location of my phone?
