I just looked it up, and apparently if you touch the blue dot showing your current location, it pops up a menu where you can save your location, among other things.
I once did this by accident, and for a year or more the maps app kept offering to send me to where my car was parked (500 miles away from home, a couple blocks away from my daughter’s apartment). Needless to say, this confused me.
My kids never had smartphones until they graduated high school. Nor did they have cars; my son got “his” first car (previously, he just used one of ours as needed) back in 2018 when we designated my husband’s elderly Civic as his. He was a bit too old to be tracking him at that point!
That said, I did cyberstalk the kid when he went to Europe back in 2016. Solo, never been anywhere where he didn’t speak the language… yeah, we were nervous. So, on 2-3 occasions when we hadn’t heard anything from him, I logged onto his Apple account to see where the phone was. I have never told him I did this. I suppose I’ll come clean some day. In any event, the phone was never anywhere totally unexpected, so just seeing that was reassuring.
When my daughter did a solo trip (bus to Tennessee to see the clips in 2017), she knew we’d done this with her brother. I didn’t have her current Apple password, and she didn’t want to share with me - which was her prerogative. IIRC, I asked her to write it down and seal it in an envelope so we could use it if absolutely necessary. I don’t honestly recall if she complied; if she did, we never used it anyway. But she was much more communicative while travelling than our son was.
Yes, a GPS receiver that simply records locations periodically (say, every 10 to 30 seconds) is very inexpensive and can have a battery life of up to two weeks. Quite easy to conceal on the outside of a vehicle, but also easily discovered. You download the data by removing the device and connecting it to a PC, or by activating the BT feature.
Cellphone units that transmit real-time are almost as inexpensive, but you need to subscribe to cell service. Plus, the batteries do not last as long, making connection to the car’s power supply a good idea.
In both cases, they reduce battery drain until they are in motion.
My experience has shown that the clients are desperate to put them on their spouses’ vehicles, while the attorneys are desperate to find proof that the opposing party put them on their clients’ vehicles. I’ve had several cases where we were approached by two attorneys who represent the parties in a divorce action and each was absolutely convinced that his/her client was being tracked by the other party. And if they weren’t, “do you think maybe you could suggest that they actually were?”
Anyone have their phones sharing location with their adult kids? My daughter can track us. Helps her know how late we are running when we say we are meeting her at a restaurant …
Correct. In the Apple ecosystem you can share your share your location with anyone three ways; always (until cancelled), for the next hour, and as a one time update.
@Mama_Zappa had surreptitiously configured their son’s phone to snitch on him. Since they had his password, they just did it while he wasn’t looking. He was never the wiser.
Since daughter wouldn’t consent to tracking and Mom didn’t have her password to configure it surreptitiously, then Mom was stymied on tracking Daughter.
Which fortunately proved unnecessary since daughter self-tracked the old-fashioned way by phoning home often enough to keep Mom from dying of worry.
I actually had done NOTHING to configure my son’s phone. No apps, no spyware. I simply tried the itunes password I had on file and it worked. I’m actually not 100% proud of doing this, but when we had heard nothing at all for 3 days, I just wanted to see roughly where he was.
Correct. You can opt to share your location with someone through various means. Likely I could have asked my daughter to do that (though I’m not sure it even occurred to me). My husband and I now use an app called Glympse, which lets you share location for a short time.
