You have shared your location with someone and wondering “how to stop sharing location without them knowing“. Location sharing is a great feature for safety reasons. It allows people to track and locate you, this feature is very helpful in various conditions. You can track your phone if you lost it somewhere. If you want to hang out with your friends and you are unable to get to the location, you can use location sharing to quickly spot it. Sometimes you can use it to keep a track of your children, we can switch on the location-sharing feature on their phone to do so.
However, this feature comes at a cost of privacy, when you are sharing the location with others, they can find or keep track of every place you visit. Many people want to turn it off so that they can have their privacy. The problem that arises is, let us say your parents are seeing your location, you stop them from access and they will inquire about it. There are many ways in which you can stop sharing the location without the other person not knowing. We can also know if someone has stopped sharing the location with us. The article below tries to answer the question of how to stop sharing locations without them knowing.
If you are wondering, is it actually possible to do this? Then the answer is definitely yes, all we need to do is restrict the access using simple steps, which will not share our location with them.
1. Turn Off the Find My Phone Feature
This is one of the features that are very helpful in knowing your phone’s location when it is lost, Apple introduced it to increase the security reasons in the iPhone. We need to turn this feature off, it restricts others from knowing your location. This is like turning off the GPS tracker on your phone. This way they will be unable to see your whereabouts. Let us know how to disable this feature.
- Go to the settings on the iPhone.
- Tap on your name to access the Apple account services.
- Navigate to the “Find My” section.
- In this section, you can see that the Find My Phone is turned on, click on it and turn off the toggle.
This action stops the server from accessing the current location, that way even if you allow someone to see your location since your location is not available with the server, they won’t be able to see it.
2. How to Tell If Someone Stopped Sharing Location?
Apple provides its users with an app called “Find My.” This is very useful to track and monitor the mobile phone’s location. In this app, we can see the list of friends or people who are sharing the location access with us. So if we want to know who all are sharing their location with us or who has stopped sharing the location we can go to this list and see.
- Download the Find My app from the App Store.
- Launch the application and go to the people’s section.
- The list displays all the people who are sharing the location, if you do not find the name you are looking for, then it is evident that the person has stopped sharing the location with you.
Location sharing is a privacy thing so, not everyone who stopped sharing is bad, everyone has their own reasons.
3. Turn off Share My Location
This action turns off the location overall, as mentioned above the server is unable to read your location, if you are turning off the location. There is another feature with this app, that is we can restrict the location access with particular people too. This action won’t notify the other about the restriction. Let us know how to make the most of both features.
Turn off Share My Location for everyone
- Go to the settings on the phone.
- Click on your Apple account and navigate to the “Find My” section.
- Turn off the toggle button beside “Share My Location.”
We can also do this in the settings itself by going to the Location Services.
- Go to the settings on the iPhone.
- Navigate to the location services.
- In this section, we can see what all apps use your location and when they use them.
- Click on Share My Location and turn it off.
Turn off the Location access to certain people using these steps
Method-1
- Download the “Find My” app from the Apple Store.
- Launch the application and go to the “People” section.
- In this section, you can see all the people who can view your location.
- Tap on the person, to whom you wish to restrict access.
- If you scroll down on that contact, you can see the option “Stop Sharing My Location.”
- Tap on the option and confirm the prompt to stop the location access to that person.
Method-2
We can also do this using the iMessage app since while using the iMessages to send a message we are automatically giving the other person our device’s location access. But we have a choice to turn it off from the app itself.
- Open the iMessages app on your iPhone.
- To restrict particular people from stopping the location access, navigate to the conversation and click on it.
- Click on the person’s name, you will see info about the person.
- In the options, click on info and tap on stop sharing my location.
After this, the person won’t be able to see your location, and won’t receive any notification regarding this but when they access the people list on Find My app, they won’t see your name on it. If you start allowing them to access your location then they will receive a notification and see the name in the list.
4. Turn On Airplane Mode
If we turn on the Airplane mode, it cuts off all the network and cellular connections in the iPhone. So if it is enabled people won’t be able to see your real-time location. All you have to do is swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen and turn on the Airplane mode. The icon with an Airplane symbol on it.
The one thing you need to remember when we enable the Airplane mode is you won’t receive any calls, or messages since all the cellular networks are disconnected. We can do this by going to the settings also, just clicking on the app, and navigating to the Airplane mode. Turn on the toggle beside it.
5. Change the IOS device location
If you have multiple IOS devices, we can use the Find My gimmicks to trick people into not knowing the exact real-time location of our phones. But we need to log in to both devices using the same Apple ID, then only it is possible to spoof the location. Let us know the steps to hide your location using the iPad and iPhone.
Using the iPad:
- First things first, log in to both devices using the same Apple ID.
- On iPad, go to the settings.
- Click on your name and you can see multiple options.
- In the Find My section, Turn on Share My Location and also click on Use this iPad as My Location.
Now the location is set to your iPad location, leave it at any place and take your phone, this will show the iPad location and hide the location of your phone.
Using iPhone:
- Go to the settings and click on your profile.
- In the location services, switch on the share my location.
- Now on another device, download the Find My app from the App Store.
- Launch the application and click on the Me Option in the settings.
- Navigate to Use this iPhone as My Location and turn it on.
This does the same as the iPad, it just replaces the location of the previous device.
6. Spoof the GPS location
There are many third-party apps and websites available in the market, which lets you spoof your location. This is a safe and secure method since all the above-mentioned methods will remove your name in the people section in the Find My app, as soon as you follow the methods above. These third-party apps let you fake any location without letting others know about it. We need to connect the computer to your iPhone while enabling the fake location. Let us go through the steps to fake the location using an application called iToolab AnyGo.
- Go to the AnyGo website to download it on your device.
- Launch the application on your computer and connect your phone to it.
- After launching, give permission to the required fields and click on start.
- Click on the Teleport icon to select a location to fake.
- A search bar pops up, enter the desired location name in the search bar, and a set of all available locations in and around that location will be displayed.
- Select a location and a prompt displaying “Go” appears on the screen, tap on it to finish the process.
Similarly, using the same application we can also set a virtual location too. In the app, we can see the Location Change option, click on it. Connect your phone and just as above enter a location in the search bar and select a location from the available locations.
You can use any of the above-mentioned ways to solve your query about how to stop sharing location without them knowing, all of them work well. Sharing your location sometimes is very useful, since parents are concerned about their children’s safety. This feature also compromises our privacy sometimes. So share your location with only those you trust the most.
