What You Need To Know About Turning Off "Find My Friends" On iPhone

When Apple released iOS 13 in September 2019, it brought a lot of big changes to the iPhone — and some smaller, subtler ones that you may not notice at first glance. One of those adjustments: Find My iPhone and Find My Friends have been combined into one app called "Find My." This is an update that is available in iOS 14 as well. If you don't want to share your location with your friends, you can still turn off Find My Friends in iOS 14 and keep Find My iPhone turned on.

The Find My iPhone app lets you track the last known location of your phone, iPad, and laptop, while Find My Friends allows you to share your location with other people and see where they are if they choose to share with you. In previous iOS releases, the features were located in two separate apps, so iOS 14 does make it more convenient to switch between the two. Still, if you aren't comfortable sharing your location with other people — whether you have security and privacy concerns or just don't want to — you can keep Find My iPhone on and disable Find My Friends. Here's what you need to do.

Open The "Find My" App

After you update to iOS 13 or later versions, the app should show up on your device. If you can't find it, open search and type in "Find My."

When you open the app, you'll see a toolbar at the bottom with three icons labeled People, Devices, and Me.

Tap the Me Icon

Once you tap the Me icon, you'll see a "Share My Location" option. If you toggle it off, your current location won't be visible to the people you were sharing it with previously. They'll see a "location unavailable" message when they attempt to pull up your location, which is the same message the app shows if your phone is turned off.

Check iPhone Settings

After you turn off location sharing, your iPhone registers the change in Settings. To make sure that Find My Friends is no longer enabled, open Settings and tap your name and picture at the very top of the screen. Then, look for the Find My option. You'll see that "Share My Location" is now automatically toggled off after making changes in the Find My app, but Find My iPhone is still on.

Stop Sharing With Specific People

If you want to stop sharing your location with a specific person, you can also make this change in the new Find My app. Tap the People icon at the bottom of the screen in the app, then select the person from the list. From there, tap Stop Sharing My Location, and they'll now see "Location Unavailable" when they open Find My and search for your location.

You can also choose to turn off individual device tracking in the app if you aren't interested in using Find My iPhone. But if you want a way to track down your misplaced phone while still keeping your location private from the people on your contact list, turning off location sharing is your best bet.