Hey,
so while i’m very enthusiastic about home automation, my girlfriend is not so much. And especially, she doesn’t want me to be able to know her location all the time through the app.
She agrees that it will show “home” or “not home” for automation.
Is there such a way to do it?
Currently we use Life360 on her phone which works well but tells her exact location all the time.
Don’t use a GPS tracker on her phone, just use a local one like ping or Bluetooth.
Use the Home assistant app and disable the GPS location and background location.
But enable sensors and use the wifi sensor to see what wifi network she is connected too.
(if that is OK with her)
As a slight variation to @Hellis81’s suggestion, you could also use one of the various network trackers (nmap, asus, etc) to detect when her device is on the network or not via IP.
Also, I just saw this the other day, which is targeted towards teens. I guess it could be used here as well?
The problem network trackers is that they are generally not good.
This is my router based tracking (which is surprisingly good today…)
(here purple means I was not home)
And here is the wifi “tracker”
(here purple means I was home)
It may not seem as much difference but usually the router based tracker is less accurate than now.
True on both points. I typically find that the nmap tracker has been best when it comes to network tracking. The problem is usually the mobile device going to sleep or Google and/or Apple’s “intelligent WiFi management” mucking things up.
Sadly, what’s been most reliable for my household (aside from life360) is BLE tracking along with iBeacons. Both my wife and I have 5 different device_trackers assigned to each of us and one of them is an iBeacon we both carry:
I am in the exact same situation.
I use Monitor to detect our phones via bluetooth.
and then since we are both using iphones i have setup two input booleans exposed them via homekit and then setup a homekit automation to enable or disable the input boolean when entering the home zone.
I works 99% of the times, and no constant gps position is known.
Hope it helps 
That’s genius! I never thought about doing that.
All credit goes to this thread Homekit Presence.
It work very very well, i have been using it for about three years without big hiccups.
Interesting! you think it can work with android phones, maybe with Smartthings app?
The monitor part definitely will, but homekit is only for apple gear. i dont know of any android solution since i have only used iphones.
Best solution: Dump the girlfriend. Life is short.
I also went the nmap ping route
it is rock solid and very very reliable - been using it for about 2 years now and very happy with it.
Your lucky, my GF low-jacked me with life360 before we even had home assistant 
I am in exactly the same boat. I would love the companion apps to report only home/away status without sending the exact GPS coordinates to the server on every update.
I created a feature request, please vote and maybe we that feature can get added:
We are soon going to move to a different apartment with a staircase.
I started thinking about how to make the door open as we approach the house.
I think about placing a bluetooth beacon in the window facing the door and shielding it on the back side with tin foil to make it “directional”.
How well does those bluetooth trackers work for you?
What type are they? I recall you said “nut” in a different topic?
What kind of range? What do you use to “read” them, ESP-Home?
I actually had to ditch using BLE, but not because of the trackers themselves (I was using these: Amazon.com). In my case, I had 5 rPi zeros spread about my house running Room Assistant. But, they were causing havoc with my WiFi (Unifi APs) and causing dropouts all over the place due to the BLE interference. 
For people who may still be looking for this feature, (to share the location zone only and not the exact location), it was added in 2022.10 companion app settings both for Android and iOS (here the iOs pr: Setting for types of locations sent to a server by zacwest · Pull Request #2015 · home-assistant/iOS · GitHub).
