Prevent some users in owntracks from appearing in my HA system

Dear all:

i am one of few person who started using owntracks long before I plunge myself into Home Assistant.

As result, my owntracks server has a lot of users which is not relevant to home assistant.

My question is, how to prevent these users from showing up? I tried to delete these users from my known_devices.yaml file, but everytime Home Assistant get rebooted, these users showed up automatically.

Worse, I have notice that if I modified the entry in known_devices.yaml file (turned hide_if_away to “true” and/or track to “false,” AND in some cases, added icon/mac entry) every time I restart HA, another entry of same device with “hide_if_away: false” and “track: true” will be added to the known_devices.yaml file.

I tried to make the known_devices.yaml file read only, but that completely broke the known devices in HA.

I am a bit confused on why HA behave like this.

What am I suppose to do?

Thanks in advance

have you tried to define the users you want to keep under the waypoint_whitelist option?

did not notice that option. thank you for your pointer!

1 Like

actually, now I looked back at configuration, I did have waypoint_whitelist setup:

device_tracker:
  - platform: owntracks
    max_gps_accuracy: 100
    mqtt_topic: owntracks/#
    waypoints: true
    geocode: true
    waypoint_whitelist:
      - user1
      - user2
      - user3
      - user4

where user1 user2 user3 user4 are part of my topic:

owntracks/user1/phone
owntracks/user2/phone
owntracks/user3/phone
owntracks/user4/phone

Unfortunately, this option has no effect what so ever.

am i doing anything wrong?