I'll have a look at it.
In the meanwhile, I've been using Tasker for that: if an SMS from curtains numbers is received with the text "POSITION", it will reply back with an OpenStreetMap link of the smartphone position.
Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do
When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.
God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.
Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information... that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can't really self-host a crowd-sourced network.
I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.
My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.
The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.
God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.
You'd be surprised what little impact on battery it actually has. I find this type of swift casting aside of something you've not even tried to be rather disingenuous.
Also, if your device has a cellular modem with an active connection, your provider is already tracking your location constantly and selling your personal information to the highest bidder anyways (including law enforcement and governments), so IMO it's a bit pointless to worry so much about that.
They can have data about your past but if you care about privacy, you can limit data collection a lot and outdated data is useless in many cases. Sacrificing privacy is a questionable choice and won't give a conscious person peace of mind at all lol but everyone makes their own decisions.
If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.
Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they'll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which... defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that "Fred Smith in Afghanistan" is really "Fred Smith in North Carolina"
Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can't. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.
And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.
I've been sending my position to my server (with Traccar and GPSlogger) for years and I haven't had any problems with the battery.
It sends out the position every 5 seconds (excessive, I know!!! 🙈) and every 69 seconds when the battery is below 25% and only when it's not connected to a WiFi network.
But I'm with you about the new Google tracking system. I haven't had the chance to check: does it work like Apple and can track devices that have been turned off?
How does googles network work I assumed every phone know its own location and can relay location of nearby devices combined with multiple devices and some triangulation and maybe WiFi ssid tracking u can locate almost anything. Now that raises the major concern mainly google will know the location of every single device I'm sure its doing Bluetooth scanning so I doubt even I on graphene will be getting tracked. Surly there is a better decentralised anonymous solution here.
Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone's location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.
Which... is why this fundamentally does not work with "hacker" solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don't have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.
*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.