How to Stop Sharing Location without Them Knowing iMessage

Your phone’s location is an essential part of your cell phone because it has the ability to keep track of a lot of things, from GPS tracking to mutually sharing location with family and friends. A lot of applications nowadays make use of your phone’s location to personalize and filter your experience within the application.

It’s always nice getting feeds, ads and content that correlates with wherever you are in the world. With your phone’s location active, you can be able to track your cell phone in a situation where it is lost or stolen. Another awesome feature is the ability to know where your loved ones are and vice versa using each other’s location through apps like ‘Find My’ application.

Sharing your location with others might seem very useful and fun, but there are times when all you want to do is turn off your location and enjoy that piece of privacy. However, the thought of certain people knowing that you have turned off your location stops you from doing so.

To go off the radar by turning off your location without anyone knowing, you can continue reading this article to find out the different ways of doing so.

Importance of Stopping Location Sharing in iMessage

Stopping location sharing in iMessage is important for several reasons:

  1. Privacy: Location sharing in iMessage can reveal sensitive information about your whereabouts, which can be a privacy concern.
  2. Security: Sharing your location with others can put you at risk, especially in situations where you need to keep your location private for safety reasons.
  3. Control: Stopping location sharing gives you control over your location data and who has access to it.
  4. Personalization: Not everyone wants to share their location, and stopping location sharing allows individuals to personalize their iMessage experience and share only what they feel comfortable with.
  5. Compatibility: Some individuals may not have location services enabled or may not want to share their location with others, stopping location sharing ensures compatibility with those individuals.

Overall, stopping location sharing in iMessage is crucial for maintaining privacy, enhancing security, having control, personalizing the experience, and ensuring compatibility.

How to Stop Sharing Location without them knowing iMessage

There’s multiple reasons why you would want to stop sharing your location with others. These reasons could be a need to maintain some privacy without having anyone else knowing where you are all the time or restricting some applications to stop them from misusing your location data, which honestly a lot of applications do.

You have the option of stopping your phone from sharing your location without anyone knowing and this can be done through several methods that will be described in detail in this article.

1. Activating ‘Airplane Mode’ on Your iPhone

Turning on your phone’s airplane mode is the easiest method of switching off your iPhone’s location without notifying anyone. Putting your phone in airplane mode not only deactivates your location, but it also puts a halt on all cellular and WiFi connections as well.

To activate ‘Airplane Mode’ on your iPhone:

  • Access the control center by swiping down your screen.
  • Click on the aeroplane icon that’s found among the set of options in a box on the upper left corner.
  • The icon will turn orange if the ‘Airplane mode‘ has been successfully activated.
  • To turn off this mode, all you need to do is tap on the aeroplane icon again.
  • Very simple and method.
  • Does not require external software.
  • Deactivates all your connections as well.
  • Limits your phone’s usage.

2. Turning off Location Sharing with your iMessage Contacts

If you share your location with your family and friends through iMessage, they can continually track your every location live through iMessage and that might get overwhelming at times. We don’t want to have our location to be public all the time, so turning that feature off is very important.

To stop sharing your location with friends through iMessage:

  • Visit the ‘Message‘ application on your iPhone or iPad device.
  • Search for the contact you wish to stop sharing your location with.
  • Access the conversation and on the top right corner of your screen, click on ‘Details‘.
  • You will see the option ‘Stop Sharing My Location‘. Click on it to stop sharing your location with that contact.
  • Very quick and easy.
  • Precise method of disabling location.
  • Can only stop sharing with contacts one by one.

3. Turning off Location Sharing on the ‘Find My’ Application

The Find My app has a lot of beneficial features that includes allowing you to share your location with family and close friends through iOS devices and helping you to trace your phone when it is lost or stolen.

You can stop sharing your location on ‘Find My’ without having to stop using the application and here is how:

  • Open the ‘Find My‘ app on your device and on the bottom right corner, you’ll see the ‘Me‘ icon.
  • Click on the icon and you will see a toggle that states ‘Share My Location‘.
  • Tap on the toggle to switch it on and off.
  • You can also select which members of the ‘Find My‘ app you wish to share your location with by individually selecting them through the ‘People‘ tab.
  • Simple and precise method
  • Provides general and individual options of location sharing.
  • Stops location sharing to ‘Find My’ members only.

4. Turning off Location Sharing Through your iPhone Privacy Settings

You can disable location sharing through your phone’s settings. This will disable all location permissions granted to all applications on your iPhone. This is a general method of stopping location sharing and it might affect the performance of some applications on your phone that require the use of location services.

To use this method:

  • Go to the ‘Settings‘ app on your iOS device and click on the ‘Privacy‘ tab.
  • Find and access ‘Location Services‘ and ‘Disable Location Services‘. This will generally halt location sharing on all applications of your phone.
  • In the ‘Location Services‘ settings, you will see another option that says ‘Share My Location‘ which you can also disable through ‘Disable Share My Location‘ to stop sharing your location with friends.
  • Quick and straight to the point.
  • No external application needed.
  • Non-precise method of disabling location sharing.
  • May affect performance of other applications.
  • Available for iOS 8 or higher only.

5. Using Another iOS Device’s Location as your Own

You can fake your location by using the location of your other iOS device by sharing your location with that device. This will allow you to set a fake location for yourself through that other device.

To do this:

  • Open the ‘Settings‘ app on your iPhone and tap on your profile.
  • Enable ‘Share My Location‘ by toggling the button.
  • The same process should be done on your other iOS device.
  • On your other device, access the ‘Find My‘ app and create a label for your current location.
  • Search through the list of available people by scrolling down and tap on the option to send the location.
  • Effective and precise.
  • Temporary and easy to disable.
  • The process is not very fast and easy.
  • Requires another iOS device of yours to work.

6. Faking your Location Through Third Party Applications

You can choose to share a false location with other people who have access to your location by going to the extreme of using applications like Tenorshare iAnyGo and NordVPN to send a fake real-time location. This method is not easy and will require the use of a computer system which can be either Microsoft or MacBook.

To make use of Tenorshare iAnyGo for example:

  • Download the Tenorshare iAnyGo software through tenorshare on your computer and install it.
  • Open the application after installing it and click the ‘Enter‘ button.
  • Connect your iPhone with the computer system through a USB cable.
  • The system will automatically fetch your device’s location.
  • Now, type the location you want to use as your fake location on the GPS coordinate option or by selecting the location via the map available on the software.
  • You can click the ‘Restore‘ button to restore your location back to the real one and then click on ‘Restart‘.
  • Temporary and easy to disable.
  • Private and untraceable.
  • Difficult and slow process.
  • High risk of malware.
  • Requires external software assistance.

Conclusion

Sharing your location with other people and applications has beneficial purposes but there are times when your privacy comes first and you need to switch off the location sharing option for a time. This can be done through a series of methods that include turning on your airplane mode, switching off location services in the phone privacy settings, or through third party softwares.

In this article, the various methods of disabling your location without anyone getting notified about it by following the simple procedures explained in detail.

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