This is a carrier in the USA (T-Mobile).
I did a quick search for the other 2 carriers using the term “[Carrier Name] Family Tracking” and Verizon and AT&T also seems to have it.
And according to https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/t-mobile-familywhere-app, it says:
FamilyWhere uses geolocation data from the T-Mobile network and is not affected by changes to device location settings.
So it appears that its using cell tower triangulation. Turning on Airplane Mode should stop it (assuming there isn’t a separate tracking app on your phone)
Oh Wow, What a wonderful tool for abusive spouses and abusive parents. And telecom companies are making money off of it. 🙃
TLDR: Its a good idea to get your own separate cellular plan.
Unfortunately, before actually reading your post I reported this as spam. Why?
- your account is young
- it’s called throwaway
- the title and image appeared to promote a service
- nothing hinted at the notion that this was a community warning
Lol, this is literally a privacy community, why do you think people would use a throwaway account?
And its sarcasm. Someone posting a “Hire a hitman today!” isn’t actually advocating murder, just to point out the absurdity of the situation.
But it’s fine, I get it, sarcasm is hard to understand.
Unfortunately, after reading your comment I reported this as spam. Why?
- It adds nothing of substance
- It has nothing to do with the topic at hand
- It does nothing to better the community
- It could make people not want to contribute to the community
- It uses bullet points like an LLM
Thats messed up if u can do this without consent of whoever you are tracking.
If you are gonna do this the right way, with consent, there’s probably free apps that can do this (not sure if there are any privacy friendly ones though, but I believe iphones have a tracking feature that’s free).
$10/month is scammy, but they know their target audience ig (abusers probably, like you say).
The counter argument on this is, you need to be an authorized person on the account to enable and considering authorized people are the people who are paying the bill they have full control. In the eyes of the Telecom the authorized user owns every device that’s on the account so they say they want to track it they’re allowed to track.
If you’re worried about privacy and someone tracking you that’s part of your plan, you need to isolate into a separate plan. You lose so many areas of privacy by being on someone else’s plan, like the saving money is nice but they can look up your call history, some carriers allow you to look up SMS history it’s not good
Getting a Faraday pouch should be able to fix this
This is already a thing on iOS but it’s free (and you have to opt-in with whoever you share your info with of course)
Edit: Though looking at it again it’s just the current location not the rest of their “features”
I mean, in a way it’s nice for consumers to have access to the features the police state has developed for itself, I guess?
