Every way to turn off location sharing on iPhone

There are four or five places sharing can be switched on, and turning them off is easy. The part that is not obvious is what each one looks like from the other side.

The short answer: none of these send a push notification saying you stopped, with the exception of Life360, which announces some changes on purpose. All of them still leave a hole where you used to be, and a hole is something a person can read.

The other thing to know before you start tapping: these are separate systems that happen to share a phone. Switching off Find My does nothing to Google Maps, and neither of those does anything to Life360. To be off the map generally you have to visit every place that has you on one.

Find My

Everyone at once: Find My, Me tab, and turn Share My Location off.

One person: Find My, People tab, tap them, Stop Sharing My Location.

There is a second door to the same switch: Settings, your name at the top, Find My, Share My Location. It is the same setting rather than a second one.

Share My Location and Find My iPhone are not the same feature, and the names do a poor job of saying so. Share My Location is the one your family sees. Find My iPhone is how you locate your own device after losing it, and it is tied to Activation Lock. Turning off sharing leaves Find My iPhone alone, which is what nearly everyone actually wants. Switching off Find My iPhone to hide from a person is a bad trade.

One more wrinkle: your account shares from one device at a time, and the setting marked "Use This iPhone as My Location" decides which one. Turn sharing off on the phone, leave a signed-in iPad at home, and you can still be on the map, apparently sitting in your living room.

No push notification is sent. But your entry changes to "Location Not Available" or leaves their list entirely, so anybody who looks will know. Silent is not the same as invisible.

Messages

Sharing started inside a conversation lives there too. Open the thread, tap the contact name, and Stop Sharing Location. This is separate from Find My, and it is the one people forget.

There is a reason it gets forgotten. Sharing from a thread offers one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely, and indefinitely is the option people tap while trying to make a dinner plan work. The timed ones expire on their own and leave nothing to switch off. The third does not.

Worth separating from its neighbour in the same menu: Send My Current Location drops one static pin into the conversation and stops there, while Share My Location starts a live feed. If somebody can watch you move, it is the second one.

The two systems are joined at the back. Someone you shared with from Messages turns up in the Find My People tab, and stopping it in either place stops it in both. That is what the phone I checked does; I have not gone back through older iOS versions.

Google Maps

Its own system, independent of Apple’s. Profile picture, Location sharing, pick the person, Stop. Google also emails periodic reminders that you are sharing, which is worth knowing if you are trying to be discreet.

Google Maps sharing has a clock on it too: a set number of hours, or until you turn it off. The open-ended option is what generates the reminder emails, and it is why a share set up for one afternoon two years ago can still be running.

The trap here is that location sharing and Location History are different settings in different menus. Stopping the share means one person can no longer see you. It does nothing about the record Google keeps of where you went, and if that record is your real reason for switching off, you have not switched anything off.

Life360

The most talkative of them. Ghost Mode and Bubble both notify the circle, by design, because the product is sold on the promise that people cannot quietly opt out. Leaving a circle is visible too.

The switches are easy to find; the consequences are the point. Ghost Mode swaps your position for a label saying you are not sharing, which is more conspicuous than the position was. Bubble shows an area instead of a point and still announces itself. Leaving the circle takes you off the list, which is the loudest option on offer.

Uninstalling is not a quiet exit either. The app stops reporting and the circle is left with a timestamp that keeps getting older, which reads as a dead phone or a person who did something. Life360 also revises this interface often, so treat the labels here as approximate and the behaviour, which is that the circle finds out, as the constant.

This is why the Life360 question is asked so much more often than the others, and we have a separate guide comparing every method. Ghost Mode has a page of its own, and so does pausing rather than leaving.

Snapchat, WhatsApp and everything else with its own switch

Past the big four, the pattern repeats app by app.

• Snapchat. Ghost Mode on the Snap Map. No notification goes out, but your Bitmoji disappears from the map, and to a friend used to seeing it there that absence is the message. There is a whole guide on that one.
• WhatsApp. Live location is time limited by design: it runs for the window you chose and then stops, and you can end it early from the chat.
• Anything that asked for Always. An app holding background location permission is not showing you to a friend, it is sending you to a company. Different problem, different menu, covered below.

The heavier switches

These come up when the per-app switches feel like too much work.

Location Services off entirely lives in Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services. Nothing gets a position after that, including Maps, weather, camera geotagging and your own ability to find the phone if you lose it. Per-app permission is the sensible version of the same idea, and the permission levels are worth understanding before you change them.

Airplane Mode stops the phone reporting anything, along with calls, messages and data. It is a poor privacy setting that happens to have a privacy side effect. Switching the phone off is the same move with more consequences and a longer gap on the map.

Turning off sharing is not turning off tracking

These two get conflated constantly and they are different jobs. Sharing is about named people: your mother, your partner, a group chat from a festival. Tracking is about companies, and none of the switches above touch it.

Stop sharing with every person in Find My and the weather app still knows where you are, the ride app still holds your history, and Significant Locations, the log iOS keeps on the device of the places you keep returning to, carries on being kept. What apps actually collect and how to cut it down are separate questions with separate answers.

What I have not checked

The usual list, which is more useful than pretending there is not one.

• How fast the change shows up. "Location Not Available" does not appear the instant you tap, and how long it takes moves with the other person’s app, their network and Apple’s servers. I am not putting a number on it.
• The Android view. The person watching may be on Android, where Life360 and Google Maps look different and can word things differently. All of the above is the iPhone side.
• Managed accounts. Family Sharing organisers, child accounts and Screen Time can change both what is available and who gets told. Untested here.
• Carrier family locators. The add-ons sold by mobile networks do not live on your phone, so none of these settings touch them.

The common thread

Which is the honest framing of the whole category: switching off is easy, and switching off is legible. A plausible location is not.