Is your phone tracking you? Anonymity is becoming more and more important as time passes and a lot of people don’t really like the fact that their phones are literally monitoring everywhere they go. If you want to learn how to hide location on your iPhone, you’ve come to the right spot.
1. Turn Off Location Services
The quickest and easiest way to hide your location on iPhone would be to simply turn off your location services in settings. You can follow these instructions to get this done.
- First, open up your iPhone and go into your “Settings” app.
- At the top of the settings app, there is a search bar, type in the word “Location” in that search bar.
- A drop-down menu will pop up with a few different search results for the word “Location” and you will want to find the option that only shows the word “Location” and under that it says “Privacy” in smaller letters. You can also look for the blue box with the white hand emoji next to the “Privacy” option to make sure you’re on the correct selection. Select the correct option once you’ve found it.
- This will take you to your “Location Services” and here you will be able to completely shut off all location tracking on your iPhone by disabling the “Location Services” option.
Once you tap to slide the “Location Services” to disabled, a message will pop up saying “Location Services will be disabled for all apps…” Select the “Turn Off” option and your iPhone’s location services will be completely disabled.
2. Use Another Device to Share Location
If you have multiple devices, it’s possible to change your current location settings to one of your other devices. For example, if you also have an iPad you could have your location settings show your iPad as your current location instead of your iPhone. How? Read on to find out.
- Open up the “Settings” app on your iPhone.
- Tap on the tab with your name.
- Tap on the “Family Sharing” tab.
- Tap on the option “Location Sharing” in the “More to Share” options.
- Select a device and then tap “Use this (Device) as My Location”.
3. If You Want to Hide Your Precise Location
You can change your location settings to show only an “Approximate Location” instead of your precise location. In order to use the approximate location, you will need to be running at least iOS 14 or better.
- Open up the “Settings” app.
- Scroll down and tap on the “Privacy” option.
- Tap on “Location Services”.
- You’ll see all the apps that use your location and you can change your location settings for each one.
- Select the app you want to change location settings for then scroll down and disable “Precise location”.
4. If You Want to Hide Location from iMessages
If you don’t want your friend or family members to have access to your location every time you send an “iMessage” then here is how you can disable that option.
- Open the “Settings” app.
- Tap on your name.
- Select “Find My”.
- Then tap on the slide option of “Share My Location” to disable it.
5. If You Want to Hide Location from Find My
“Find My” is an app to help locate your device if lost or stolen, but it will also share your location to your family if you have allowed it. If you don’t want your “Find My” app to have access to your location and share it with your family or friends, you can disable Find My iPhone or Share My Location as well. Follow the steps below to turn off “Find My” or “Share My Location”.
- Open up the “Settings” app.
- Tap on your name.
- Select “Find My”.
- If you just don’t want to share your location with your family or friends, you can turn off “Share My Location”.
- If you don’t want Find My to access your location, tap on “Find My iPhone” then slide the tab to disable it.
- Enter your Apple ID password.
- Tap “Turn Off”.
6. If You Want to Hide Location from Other Apps
If you’re worried about apps always having access to your location, this is how you can set their location access to “Never”.
- Open “Settings”.
- Scroll down and tap on “Privacy”.
- Tap on “Location Services”.
- Choose the app you want to disable access for then select “Never” in location settings.
You can only do this for one app at a time so if you want to change this setting for multiple apps, you will need to set each one individually.
7. How to Hide iPhone Location Without Turning It Off
To hide your real location, you can use third-party tools to fake your iPhone’s location without turning off iPhone location services. Here we recommend AnyGo developed by iToolab. It can modify iPhone location with one click and help you fake your location.
Since AnyGo is a desktop software, there will be no traces on the phone. If you don’t want to hide your location, just restart the iPhone. It’s very easy to use and convenient. You can download the trial version to have a try. Here are the specific steps to hide the real location of your iPhone.
- First, download and launch AnyGo. Click “Start”.
- For the first use, please connect your iPhone to your computer via a USB cable, and you can use WiFi to connect later.
- Once the iPhone is connected, the program will load a “map”.
- Under AnyGo’s Teleport mode, you can choose a location on the map, search for the location you want to set as your iPhone’s location, or simply enter the coordinates.
- After selecting a location on the map, click Move to set your iPhone’s location to that address.
This way, your iPhone location will be faked for all the location-based apps, so your iPhone’s actual location won’t be discovered.
In addition to changing location, AnyGo can also design moving routes and simulate GPS movements. You can set the movement between two points or between multiple points, and customize the movement speed. The program also provides a joystick mode, which is also very suitable for some AR games.
Does Airplane Mode Disable GPS and Hide Your Location?
Unfortunately no, turning on airplane mode does not hide your location. Airplane mode only turns off your phone’s cellular service and WiFi. Doing this only disconnects your phone from its cellular network, but it doesn’t disable location services. GPS is its own separate technology that uses satellites to send and receive signals to track location, which doesn’t require a cellular network or WiFi. Therefore, simply turning on airplane mode will not protect your phone from being tracked by third parties. You will need to actually disable your phone’s location services in order to keep your location safe from being tracked.
