Double data with google maps location sharing

My wife and me are sharing our respective locations by Google Maps long time ago, so I thought it would be perfect for hassio presence control and tracking. I can use her account as the account where I share my position, and mine as the account for share her position…The problem is that if I do that, it works correctly, but instead of getting two people on the map, I get four… that is just our coordinates, but repeated … two with the names I wrote for the cookies, and two with some numbers as name….Do you know any solution to get our position only using our shared accounts and not having to créate two new accounts only for that?

Just use one of the accounts. It will create two device tracker entities, one for each of you. Normally the entity_id’s are device_tracker.google_maps_NNNNN where the NNNNN part is a unique ID number. However, for the device tracker that represents the person whose account you configured in HA, that one’s entity_id will be different and will contain the name of the account (usually the gmail address.) That’s just the way it works. For example, I track seven people (including myself), and all the device tracker entity_id’s, except for mine, has the unique ID format, whereas mine has my gmail address.

EDIT: Oh, and after you remove one of the accounts from HA you’ll need to manually edit known_devices.yaml to delete the two extra device trackers.

1 Like

FWIW - personally I just created a ‘ghost’ Google account and had my wife and I both share our locations with this account. I then logged in and downloaded the cookie file - and associated this ‘ghost’ account w/ HA. Felt a little more secure than giving my ‘real’ Google account to HA. Anyhow, just my $.02 on what worked for me.

3 Likes

I wonder if owntracks is useful here, not just as a way to avoid giving Google your location (sigh) but also as a way to avoid sharing Google account cookies, which might be unreliable if the account heuristics become suspicious.

1 Like

I tried owntracks before Google maps sharing, but it don´t worked fine. I don’t know what option is better for secutity, but Google is much more precise in my experience. Of course, I can be wrong. If there are a good security reason, I will try owntracks again.

I had some issues w/ Google’s cookies a few months back and tried switching to Owntracks - and would agree that it doesn’t seem nearly as precise. It also is yet another GPS device chewing up your phone’s battery - so I went back and figured out the Google cookies -> HA issues I was having and re-enabled tracking via Google.

Yes, I agree, they know too much about me, but it’s a trade-off of convenience / privacy - and while I don’t love it (Google having all this info) - at the end of the day the convenience is really nice to have…

1 Like

A new account with our shared locations was the solution, as Markus99 said. But I now I can’t delete my old owntracks entity. Our last owntracs position remains on the map. and I don’t know how to remove it… trash button on entities page do nothing…