My wife and I use the iOS app to access home assistant from outside our network as its handy and we can configure the password within the App rather than entering it every time. The problem is it is also tracking our location and showing it on the map, which we don’t want it to do. We only want home assistant to report whether we are home or not.
In the App it says to disable location tracking add track_ios: false to each zone settings or under customize.
I have only one zone set up which is home. Adding track_ios: false under that section does nothing and I have no problem with it knowing we are home anyway. I have also tried adding this under cutomize like below without success;
customize:
device_tracker.myiphone:
entity_picture: /local/andy.jpg
friendly_name: Andy
track_ios: false
What am I doing wrong? And how do I change it so it only shows whether we are home or not? (i.e. connected to the wifi)
I’m not sure you can tell it not to track AND have it know Home/Away.
What you should be able to do is add this to each devices customize entry:
hidden: true
Additionally, in known_devices.yaml you could change
hide_if_away: false
to true.
Both would keep your icons from showing on the map IIRC. However, the drawback is I’m pretty sure that if you go to the dev panel you would be able to see the Lat/Long of each device.
Another way to just do Home/Away is via router tracking or nmap but the success rate for that isn’t the best, especially with iPhones due to aggressive power saving. Since many phones turn off Wifi when “asleep” to save battery, the device won’t show as home all the time and can toggle back and forth many times.
Edit: It’s early and I haven’t had any coffee so everything I say has the potential to be wrong.
Before I opened my home assistant to the internet the home and away was working well with the router. Maybe because we have Siri enabled and listening for ‘Hey Siri’ the wifi stays up, but that would be a guess.
I basically just want to use the iOS app for easier access to home assistant and nothing tracking wise as my router can track if home or not.
I tried removing ios: from my configuration.yaml and that didn’t change anything. Would I need to do that and delete my .ios.conf file too?
Edit: Changing hide_if_away to true does work. As you say it does still show Lat/Long in the entities section, but its still better than the map view. You lose the picture of the person showing that they are away, but that’s not a major issue.
I was expecting that would be possible in the app, but it doesn’t appear to be. It just says ‘Device Tracker Component Loaded’ in the settings, but no option to disable it.
Sorry to bump this thread, but I need to disable ios tracking from the app for my wife’s phone. Are you now able to toggle this within the app? I don’t define a zone, running only on the default home zone, so if it can’t be toggled in the app or set under the zone, as per doco, does the customize of the individual tracking entity disable tracking?
It won’t be an option in the app as it conflicts with Apple’s own permissions system.
Interesting request to have zone enter/exit tracking without out and about location tracking. Might be something I can work in for the next version, should be easy enough.
I tried to disallow access to location services to the app, without effect.
The only way to disable the location tracking compononent in the app seems to be to delete it from your iPhone and download it from the AppStore again.
Location component active/installed on phone: left bottom shows upload and map icon
Location component not installed: left bottom has no icons.
i came across this issue as i dont want to install a family spy system with HA.
This is rather an old topic, but i cant figure out the suggested answer.
i wonder if this is possible:
to use HA Companion App to detect the home status (device_tracker) i.e. the sensor.ssid but not exposing the gps location to HA all the time (iOS and Android?)
Or
Hiding the gps location in HA, preferably controlled by the person respectively.