Privacy friendly app Find Your Phone?

Privacy Questions
1

I asked myself if there is a privacy friendly app like Find Your Phone of other people to locate them, in my case my wife and my son. Only they and me know of this app, and no one other can intercept the location-oriented traffic between our phones. I use Graphene-OS on my Pixel 6a, my wife and son have other Android phones.

Does such app exist? Or is there an alternative way without an app?

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2

I guess it depends on your definition of privacy friendly. If the data was ever leaked or compromised even from a private app it would be bad for y’all personally. I’ve never heard of such an app but I’m curious if there is one.

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3

Maybe Nextcloud PhoneTrack app?
https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack

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4

Have you used this? Because i actually did this try this app and it’s such a mess that i never got to understand it.

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5

I used it years ago myself and it seemed fine at the time, but I didn’t ever have a need to use it extensively. I wonder if this is a category we should look into sometime, because we get this question more than once, but I’m also not totally sure how it’s related to privacy at all…

6

I also tried it long time ago, and it seemed fine. But I have no need for such app, so I don’t know how useful it actually is

7

Nextcloud Phone Tracking is new for me. I’ll take a closer look at it. In the meantime, I found a list of the location sharing apps on Github. Probably the most interesting is the app Locus. However, it feels it is still experimental. I’m struggling to get it working, especially the import task (to import the task of one phone into another phone manually) does not work. But it is in active development, so I’ll keep an eye on it.

8

I use FindMyDevice (fdroid). It allows you to track your phone through sms or server (with end to end encryption). It also allows you to lock, ring and show message.

I needed to allow it special permission through adb so it can turn on gps/location when recieving sms. But note that I’m not sure its 100% reliable (it’s still in beta). Also note that it doesn’t work when phone is turned off so if someone steals your phone they can just shut it down.

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9

I use FMD as well. Do note that if your device is offline then your location history including last known location can still be decrypted and accessed by you, you just won’t be able to lock/ring/etc it.