Stop automatically adding device trackers to person

Hi,

I log into HA using many devices at 2 difference houses. Every time I log in, it seems to automatically add the device to my person.xxx entity as a tracker.

This then messes up presence tracking as the devices don’t move with me.

Is there any way to stop them being added as trackers automatically?

Thanks.

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I’m not sure what you are seeing but I’ve never experienced that.

Even if it did it how would HA know which “person” to add the device tracker to?

It can’t add it to a person configured in yaml and I don’t see anything even in the UI config as an option to auto add devices to a person either.

I think if you are for sure seeing that happen then it sounds like a bug that should be reported.

Same here.

I’m using HA from 3 devices. Since some releases, HA started adding device trackers of those devices to my person entity.

This is very disturbing, cause sometimes if I reboot my HA istance from remote, he thinks for some minutes that I’m at home.

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Can’t say exactly when it started, every time I log into the app, it adds it as a tracker on the person entity associated with the user that logged in.

Quite annoying since it messes up my presence automations.

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I checked just now and can confirm this. It also explains some of the odd behavior while away and off wireless and cellular, marking me as home, since that’s where my iPad is. I attempted to remove the iPad as a tracking device (while logged in on same iPad) and it disappears when I click the X to remove it, but reappears as soon as I reopen my tracking profile. Also tried to remove the iPad while using my phone and I get the same results. It goes away with the X click but come right back if you check the tracked devices. Can’t say exactly when this started, but I’ve been seeing this erratic jumping from away to home for a couple weeks. Currently running 2022-8-2.

has anyone reported the bug?

No yet, was gonna when I get back from holiday mid next week if no-one else has then.

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I believe this is by design, I’m confirming that. IIRC, the way to disable it is to disable the device tracker in the mobile app integration. Basically, when you log in on a mobile app device, it attaches that mobile apps device tracker to the person logging in.

I mean it’s good to be able to track the device, but without automatically attaching to a person entity.

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You can create an admin login for other devices that does not have a person attached to it. This would also stop this from happening. The issue is that you’re logging in with a user that is attached to a person on a device through the mobile app (iOS, android). If you don’t use the mobile app (use a browser instead), or you log in on the mobile app using a user_id that does not have a person attached, this won’t happen.

Also, this isn’t new to 2022.8. I had this happen to me when I purchased my tablet almost a year ago.

Yeah, its not a bug with this release. Sounds like expected, but possibly not desired, behaviour.

Maybe more of a feature request.

Thx

I’m not entirely sure there aren’t bugs associated with this. Something has changed recently that this has come up multiple times over the past week. It seems odd to me that I’ve seen this question more than once in the past week, when it’s been silent for the last year.

Then again, it could just be a fluke.

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That’s a strange design then.

It doesn’t seem right that the system is assigning a device tracker to a person without at least a confirmation to let the user know what it’s doing.

Of course I didn’t look everywhere but I looked in the device tracker docs and didn’t see that behavior referenced.

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Not really strange. You install the mobile app, use a login for it, you’d expect it to track your position automatically when you enable location.

I get all that but not the fact that it automatically (and without notice) adds the device tracker to a specific person entity.

That’s the strange part.

That’s how it tracks your location

I’m not sure where the miscommunication is because I’m not saying anything about the device tracker created by the mobile app that actually tracks the location of the device.

I’m talking about the system connecting that mobile app device tracker to a person entity with no notification.

But anyway I’ll just leave it here since we seem to be going in circles.

It makes sense to me. :man_shrugging:

I load the app. Add location. My person now updates it’s location and I can see that on the map. Without configuring anything other than the app. Which you opted into (location sharing).

“My device tracker” - completely agree with everything in that post.

“My person” - not so much

Lets say in my case that I and my wife both log in to HA using the same credentials.

And I create two person entities - one for each of us - to associate different device trackers (ping, unifi, life360, etc) to each person

I now set up the mobile app on both of our phones and give each mobile app a unique name based on the phone owner.

Once we both log in to our respective mobile apps using the same credentials now it seems as if you are saying that it should be normal and expected for the system to associate both mobile app device trackers to one person entity because both people log in with the same credentials. And it does this in the background without a “do you want to do this?”.

Obviously, it’s not expected behavior or you wouldn’t be seeing more people noticing it and reporting that it caused problems for their “home” automations.

As another example I guess I got lucky (or got in before the behavior was introduced) because I have a tablet that has the mobile app on it that I log into using my user credentials and it almost never leaves home but yet that device tracker didn’t become part of my person entity. So the behavior is inconsistent or something has changed since I added the app to the tablet?

Thinking about it it’s actually probably because I add all of my persons thru yaml and not the UI so the system doesn’t try to control them by randomly and unexpectedly adding device trackers to them without my knowledge.

Another win for yaml! :laughing:

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If you create one login and don’t associate it with a person, it won’t attach the device tracker to the person. So I really don’t get your point. The only way for this “issue” to happen is if you have person-user logins that are being using in multiple mobile apps. In your scenario, you wouldn’t attach the login to the person and it wouldn’t attach the device tracker to the person.

The entire point of the user-person login is to associate device trackers from mobile apps with your person.

Maybe you forgot about the days where every other post was “how do I attach my user to my person” forum posts?