You Can Now Hide Your iPhone’s Location Without Anyone Noticing

Apple’s new privacy feature is sure to be welcome news for anyone up to sneaky things.

The iPhone’s new iOS 27 update has a new feature that allows you to temporarily hide your location from someone you’re sharing it with — without sending them an alert.

Previously, if you stopped sharing your location, that person would get a little gray update in the iMessage chain you had with them (this wouldn’t be delivered like a new text, but it would be noticeable if they looked at your text exchange).

Just tap that “Hide My Location” button

Now, if you hit “Hide location” for a specific person, it won’t send that notification anymore. Instead, they’d only notice if they specifically went to find you on their map or in Find My. And then, it would simply say “No location found” and “Off-Network” — as if your phone was turned off or you were in an area with no cell service.

This is what it looks like when someone has hidden their location from you:

Previously, people would get alerted if you stopped sharing:

Apple’s announcement says that this feature is great for things like planning a surprise party for someone. Sure! Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking of.

There are, of course, plenty of good and above-board reasons you might want to temporarily hide your location. When discussing this with my editor, he recalled how he had physically turned off his phone while running a proposal-related errand — instead of ending location-sharing with his girlfriend (now fiancée) — so as not to ruin the surprise.

Revoking location-sharing isn’t always so simple

There’s a divide between Gen Z and older people where location sharing is much more normalized among the youths (if you’re horrified by the idea of sharing your location, you may be old).

Plenty of people share their location with a large group of friends — and while they do so, thinking it’s fine most of the time, everyone does stuff they want some privacy for. A doctor’s visit, a job interview, or who knows what. Not my business!

Of course, we can’t forget how Scheana Shay in the later-era “Vanderpump Rules” used her friend Katie Maloney’s location-sharing to discover that she had spent the night with a male bartender and former castmate, much to everyone’s surprise.

For friend groups that are promiscuous with their location sharing, it may seem like a passive-aggressive or pointed gesture to stop sharing your location entirely. This allows people to quietly go dark for a bit.

There’s also a safety aspect here: in abusive situations, alerting a partner or other unsafe person that you’re stopping location sharing could put you at risk.

But there are a few obvious groups of people who will be thrilled by this new development. Teenagers whose access to an iPhone is contingent upon location sharing are probably delighted by this new ability to evade curfews or skip soccer practice to hang out at the mall without their parents noticing.

And on r/adultery, there’s much celebration. “This is the most exciting thing I’ve read since they unveiled hidden apps 3 years ago!” one commenter wrote about the announcement. “Now if I can get my car to do the same thing…” wrote another.