(leggi questo post tradotto in italiano da Google translator)

It may be useful to share current location among family members or even among friends (possibly for a limited time frame, like during a holiday). This feature could be even useful for elderly people that could get lost (e.g. Alzheimer’s) if he/she is used to having his smartphone with him.

This post is mainly about sharing position even in realtime using Google Maps, but at the end I will also show how to do, possibly only for a short time (e.g. one hour), using an integrated feature available in several messages systems (e.g. WhatApp, Telegram).

Google Maps has got this behavior and you can share your own position among Contacts you have: they all must have Google services active … but this is the default configuration, at least in all Android phones! (see my previous post:
How to see where you went in a specific day and possibly disable Google default tracking of your current position)

First, you must choose to Share your position [IT: Condividi la tua posizione] in real-time from the upper left menu.

In this section, you can see all shared positions, manage them and possibly add more.

To add a new sharing, you must select one of your contacts, possibly one connected to Google Maps (a specific icon is associated for them) and ask to share your own position with him: if he will want to share his position with you too, he has to follow the same procedure on his own smartphone.
By default, a sharing is set only for one hour, but you can modify this time frame and possibly set it to forever (i.e. till it is manually deactivated). This last configuration could be the better one if the sharing is done among family members …. and if you don’t want to configure ever and ever this behavior!

After those settings, every time you go into that Share your position [IT: Condividi la tua posizione] section of Google Maps app, you can see an icon on the map localizing each one who is sharing his position with you. Clicking on the pushpin with his image (if that contact has a picture associated with it) you can see more details, like how much real-time is the provided localization and even see the battery level of his smartphone. Very often the localization is in real-time so it is stated Now [IT: Adesso].

However, possibly a time is displayed (e.g. 2 min ago [IT: 2 min fa] ): in that case you can try to update the localization, acting on the Update [IT: Aggiorna] item available in the associated menu.

If the phone can be reached, the position update is done and the associated time changed to Now [IT: Adesso].

Especially in the case of family members sharing, it could be useful to add a shortcut in the home page for each one: so clicking on each shortcut, a map is soon displayed with the proper pushpin. In the menu associated with each sharing contact, there is the item Add to Home screen [IT: Aggiungi a schermata Home] that allows to create that shortcut on the Home screen of your phone.

Note that, from time to time, an email is sent by Google alerting you that you are sharing your position with someone.

Whenever you want to stop the sharing of your position with someone, even before what you set before, you can do it from the same page simply clicking on the associate “X“:

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If you need to share your position only for a short time (e.g. one hour), you can use the simple feature that is available in several messages systems (e.g. WhatApp, Telegram).

For example, in WhatsApp you can share your position even in realtime as shows in the following:

In Telegram the procedure in quite the same:

With Signal for the time being it is possible only to share a static map, but I suppose that this feature will be introduced even there in the near future:

Anyway all those apps make use of a Google Maps functionality (see funzionalità proprie di Google Maps) and so they don’t introduce anything original, even though in this way that service is possibly easier to be set!