What your friends can and cannot see

While you are sharing your Position (what other apps call your location) with a Group, everybody in that Group sees the same short list of things about you. It is worth knowing the list exactly, because it is shorter than most people assume.

What they see

What	Detail
Where you are	A dot on the Map, at your current Position
How fresh it is	Sharing · just now, Sharing · 3 min ago — the age of the last Position your phone sent
Which named part of the venue you are in	The Area of Interest your Position falls inside, by its name, if the Map has one there
Which floor you are on	Where the Area has floors and your phone can tell
Your name and picture	Your display name and photo, or your initials if you have not set one
Which Map you are looking at	So the Group can install the same one and see the same view

They also get a notification when you arrive in an Area of Interest the map’s creator marked as announced. Not every Area is: a venue operator chooses this per Area, so a stage might announce and a car park might not.

What they never see

• Where you have been. Positions are not kept as a history and there is no trail to replay. What the Group has is your latest Position and how old it is, and that is all there has ever been.
• When you leave somewhere. You are announced arriving and never announced leaving. Why that is a deliberate choice rather than a gap is on arrivals, but not departures.
• Your phone number. Members of a Group see each other’s display names, not the numbers those accounts sign in with.
• Your battery level, your speed, or what else you are doing on your phone. None of it is sent.
• Anything about your other Groups. Someone in two of your Groups learns nothing about the one they are not sharing with you in.

What they see when your phone stops producing a Position

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the commonest surprise. If your phone stops giving the app a Position — no signal indoors, location switched off, permission withdrawn — the session keeps running and your friends keep seeing the last place you were, with a timestamp that keeps ageing.

• Under five minutes old, your row still reads as sharing, with the age beside it.
• Past five minutes, it changes to Last seen 12 min ago, and your dot is drawn as a memory rather than as a live Position.
• Where your phone never produced a Position at all, your friends see Sharing · no position against your name, and Not yet on the map instead of a place.

Nobody in the Group can tell why from their side. That is the honest limit of it, and it is the reason My friend is sharing but isn’t on the map exists as its own page.

What changes when you stop

Stopping ends the sending. Your Position is no longer sent to that Group and you are no longer drawn on their map; your row reads Not sharing. Starting again is a fresh session with a fresh length of time — see Stop Sharing.