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Can my son block me from locating him with my find my iPhone app? Is there a way for me to know if he has turned it off at all? When I was trying to locate him, he's 15, all I was seeing was a location from 3 hours prior but it showed the real time location of our other phones. Later his phone with location showed up again.

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    He may have just turned the phone off.
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 0:30
  • Putting the phone into "Airplane Mode" (or moving it into any location where no cell or wifi signal is available) would also prevent it from uploading its current location to Apple's find-my-iPhone server.
    – Jeremy Friesner
    Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 4:16
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    Another possibility is if they have multiple devices. If I didn't want my friends to see where I was going, I would set my Find my Friends to share the location of my iPad rather than iPhone before leaving home.
    – MassDefect
    Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 5:19
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    Technological solutions to social problems generally can't be omnipotent.
    – jscs
    Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 15:39
  • I would strongly recommend that you only do this as part of an explicit agreement with the young man, especially as it appears that you do not think that he is aware that you can and will do this.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Feb 9, 2019 at 0:41

2 Answers 2

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Yes - your son can block sharing of location in several ways.

The best you can do is enforce restrictions on the device to prevent changes to Find My Friend / Location settings, but if your son is savvy enough to know to hide location, they will be savvy enough to:

  • google a faraday cage and put the phone in aluminum foil
  • enable airplane mode
  • powered off the phone
  • sign in to an iPad somewhere else and shift that to report their location when they choose

Here's what the restrictions look like and I've heard of good luck just talking over the restrictions with a minor and then agreeing jointly which will help them avoid temptation and which you can graduate them past with trust in the relationship.

Share My Location Restrictions on iOS 11

At some point you'll need to find another avenue than technical measures for tracking or have an agreement that if you text he has so many minutes to get back to you, etc...

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Make sure that in his Find My iPhone settings you have "Send last location" turned on. (Settings > [His Name] > iCloud > Find My iPhone)

That way when his iPhone does go offline, you'll know where he last was. Just make sure that when you change the setting, he doesn't see it.

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    There's a setting for restricting changes to . It doesn't really work for cases where you power off the phone (AFAIK) or put it in AirPlane mode - that is a feature that sends a location when the battery is about to be exhausted due to low remaining charge - not something that pushes all the time or knows someone is about to exercise control over the location sharing.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 2:31

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