I want to set up location sharing for my family/friends, but
without having a closed source app having access to my location/sensors all the time
be able to choose when I want to share
Any recommendations?
Edit for those who find this later: I ended up choosing Traccar suggested by @mbirth@lemmy.ml, but big thanks to everyone who brought some ideas to the table! I'll leave my configs here.
After Google Latitude shut down, I went with OwnTracks logging into the light-weight php-owntracks-recorder.
I’ve since migrated that to Traccar (normally used for car fleet management) on server-side and am still using OwnTracks to push the location updates from my iPhone.
I'm using OwnTracks in HTTP mode as I couldn't be bothered with MQTT. For that, you only need the HTTP(S) endpoint/URL to log to, optionally user credentials and then it's a "TrackerID", "UserID" and "DeviceID" so the receiving server knows who's talking.
Side note: Traccar uses different ports to receive different protocols. For OwnTracks protocol, the correct port is 5144.
My OwnTracks configuration is basically like this:
TrackerID: 1
DeviceID: Phone
UserID: mb
URL: https://mytraccarserver.com:5144 (the port itself is HTTP-only IIRC, but I've mapped Traefik Proxy in front of it which handles HTTPS)
It’s shit for automating things and especially useless outside the Apple ecosystem, but it does offer the option to turn off sharing.
Apple ID -> Find My -> Share My Location
Since it’s closed source it’s possible they still capture the location and I would t trust it, but in practice anyone that you’ve allowed to see your location (for an hour, day, while on-route) gets a “location unknown” on their app of the toggle is off.