Share your location privately
Arranging to meet someone? Need to let a loved-one know where you are? Jonathan Parkyn reveals the best ways to share your location with someone privately and safely
Use Google Maps on your phone
Arranging to meet friends and family somewhere can be a logistical nightmare. Sharing the location of your meeting place – or even your own real-time location – can help. It’s easy to do, and you probably already have the necessary apps installed on your phone.
To share a location in Google Maps, such as a restaurant, for example, find the venue, tap it, then press the Share button in the pop-up tile on the lower portion of the screen (you may need to swipe left on the row of buttons beginning with Directions to reveal the Share button). Choose a method of sharing (such as Messages or WhatsApp), then select the people you want to share with and send them the location.
Alternatively, you can share your own location. This might be a better option if, say, your meeting place is particularly large, such as a park or shopping centre, or you need to be more specific about your precise meeting point. You can do this in Google Maps, too.
Open Maps, tap your profile icon in the top right, then tap ‘Location sharing’. Tap the ‘New share’ button. In the pop-up tile, you can select how long you wish to share your location. The default is one hour ( 1 in our screenshot below) but you can use the – and + buttons 2 to decrease or increase this, or select ‘Until you turn this off’. Remember to turn off location sharing manually if you select the latter option, or you’ll broadcast your location indefinitely. Below this, you can choose from the suggested contacts 3 , or tap an app icon (Messages, Gmail, WhatsApp and so on 4 ) and send the link in a message.