Look out for your family
Track down shopping mall escapees or recover a missing iPhone
Location sharing offers two key benefits for parents. First of all, it enables you to use the Find My Friends app to see where your offspring are. That’s really useful if you’ve been hanging on before starting dinner, or if they haven’t turned up at an arranged meeting point.
The feature also makes it possible to track down a missing iOS device by using the Find My iPhone app (or Find iPhone at iCloud.com). We use this often to ping misplaced iPhones and iPads that we know are somewhere in the house, but it’s also useful for remotely locking and even wiping a device that’s been lost or stolen.
1 Share your location
Each family member can share their location with other family members from one iOS device at a time. On your Mac, set who tracks you in Family Sharing’s My Apps & Services tab.
2 Choose who sees it
On iOS, you manage who sees your location in Settings > [your name] > Family Sharing > Location Sharing. You can set which device’s location is used here, or disable it altogether.
3 See others’ locations
Location Sharing transmits to Find My Friends and Find My iPhone. In this example we’ve used the latter service at iCloud.com (where it’s called Find iPhone) to track our family’s devices.
4 Locate and lock
If you think a device is lost or stolen, you can lock it (Lost Mode) or erase it altogether by selecting those options in Find My Phone. Try pinging it with the Play Sound option first!