- Google Pixel Fetaure drop adds people tracking to Find My Device
- You can share your location with friends and family
- It’ll appear as a seperate tab to your devices
As part of the March Pixel Feature Drop – and Android update – Google Pixel phones (in particular the Google Pixel 9) received a handful of new tools. But one in particular has occupied my thoughts because I’m not sure if I love it or hate: Find My Device’s new people tracking.
Find My Device is Android’s version of Apple’s Find My network. It gathers all of your connected Bluetooth devices and the Android products you’ve signed into and gives you an easy way to quickly locate those gadgets, using directions to their last location or making them play a chime so you can hear where they’re lost.
That’s all par for the course but the new tool lets you hunt down people, too. Well, it lets friends and family hunt you down specifically via the new People tab (which is currently in beta) if you choose to share your location with them. This works in much the same way as Google Maps, only now you can see people in Find My Device, too.
On the one hand this is super useful. Being able to quickly share my location with people will be great when trying to organize, say, a meetup as I can direct them all to my precise location at the push of a button instead of sending out vague directions. Alternatively, after a night out I can share my location with friends and family so they can see I made it home safely.
Is it safe?
At the same time, all of these tracking apps (of which Find My Device from Google is but one, there is also Life360, Glympse, and Google Maps to name a few more) make it clear how easy it is for us to be found by our phones, and certainly make me think twice about the threat of digital stalking – especially with news like Apple Find My’s recently discovered exploit.
Thankfully, there are digital protections in place with all of these services, with the main one being that you have to manually send your location to the people you choose. Find My Device will also alert you when tracking is enabled (as do many other services) so you’ll be reminded that your location isn’t private – which means you can either switch it off or keep it active if you still want to share where you are.
And if you’re worried about being tracked by tags you haven’t authorized, Android tech can automatically alert you to the presence of unknown trackers and help you find them – it can even make some compatible trackers play a ring tone to make it even easier to locate them.
Overall, then, the new Find My Device People feature probably falls closer to the useful side of the equation than the creepy one. If you’re keen to find out more about the recent feature drop, here are my picks for the seven best tools Google just added to Pixel phone and watches.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
