Apple added a setting to Find My in iOS 27 that lets you hide your location from one specific person, for the rest of the day, without that person being told. The company’s own example of when you might need this is planning a surprise birthday party for your spouse.
It took the internet somewhere between a few minutes and one Reddit thread to propose alternative use cases.
Underneath the jokes there is a real design decision here, and it is a more careful one than the reaction suggests.
Quick facts
- The feature is called Hide Location and lives in the Find My app under the People tab
- It pauses location sharing with chosen individuals for roughly 12 hours, then reverts to your previous setting automatically
- The other person receives no alert, no banner and no notification
- On their device your card reads “No Location Found,” which is the same thing they would see if your phone were off
- Find My in iOS 27 also adds custom sharing durations, from 15 minutes up to 30 days
- Separately, iOS 27 finally splits ringtone, alarm and notification volume into independent controls
Where to find it and what it does
Open Find My, go to the People tab, and tap your own card at the top. Under My Location you will now see a Hide Location option. Choose it, pick who you are hiding from, and your position stops updating for them.
The timer runs about 12 hours, after which everything returns to however it was set before. You do not have to remember to switch it back, which is a small detail that matters a great deal for a feature like this, because the failure mode of a manual toggle is forgetting it for three weeks and having an entirely different conversation.
The other new option is duration control. Sharing your location with someone no longer has to mean sharing it forever or for one hour. You can now pick anything from 15 minutes to 30 days, which quietly fixes the most common way people end up permanently visible to someone they meant to share with for one evening.
The important part is what they see
Every argument about this feature comes down to one line of text on somebody else’s screen.
| What you do | What they see | Are they told? |
|---|---|---|
| Stop sharing entirely | You disappear from their People list | Effectively yes. It is obvious. |
| Use Hide Location | “No Location Found” on your card | No. |
| Turn the phone off | “No Location Found” | No. |
| Lose signal in a basement | “No Location Found” | No. |
| Run out of battery | “No Location Found” | No. |
Apple did not invent a new state. It routed a deliberate choice into an existing, thoroughly ambiguous one. That is the entire feature, and it is obviously intentional.
The reaction, and the story buried inside it
The Reddit thread that spread fastest was mostly one joke told five different ways. Apple’s surprise party framing got quoted back with a raised eyebrow. Somebody suggested the surprise might be less pleasant than a cake.
One comment in that thread was worth more than the rest of it combined, and it had nothing to do with infidelity.
A user described opening Find My to look for a missing AirPod and noticing that a couple who both shared location with them happened to be nearby. Thinking about suggesting lunch, they zoomed in, and saw that the pair were at a fertility clinic. They learned the couple were expecting well before most of that couple’s inner circle did.
Nobody did anything wrong in that story. The couple consented to share their location. They did not consent to disclose a medical appointment, because those are not the same decision, and ambient location sharing collapses them into one. Continuous sharing is not a single choice made once. It is an ongoing broadcast of every choice you make afterward.
That is the problem Hide Location is built for, and it is not a hypothetical one.
Why silent matters more than convenient
There is a version of this feature that notifies the other person, and it would be worse.
Location sharing inside relationships is not always symmetric or freely given. Advocates who work on coercive control have spent years documenting how Find My and its Android equivalents get used as monitoring tools, where the sharing was never really optional and switching it off carries consequences. In that context, an alert reading “your partner has hidden their location from you” is not transparency. It is an escalation notice delivered to the wrong person.
The trade-off Apple made
Silent hiding helps someone who needs to attend an appointment, a lawyer, a shelter or a job interview without being questioned about it. The same mechanism helps someone conceal an affair. There is no version of this feature that serves the first person and not the second, because the technical requirement is identical: look exactly like a dead battery. Apple chose to build for the person with the most to lose.
This is the same reasoning that runs through a lot of Apple’s recent privacy work, where the company keeps choosing designs that fail closed rather than designs that explain themselves. It is the logic behind the Apple Watch feature that can replay audio it insists it never recorded, and behind the caution that has kept the new Siri out of several regions entirely.
It is also the same lesson women in a dozen states learned about health apps, where deleting the app turned out not to be enough, because the data had already gone somewhere else. Location is the one category where the sharing is live, which makes it the one category where an off switch actually works.
Practical things worth doing this week
Whatever you think of the feature, iOS 27 is a good excuse to look at a list most people have not opened in years.
- Audit the People tab. Open Find My and read every name sharing with you and every name you share with. Ex-partners, former roommates and a colleague from a 2022 work trip are extremely common finds.
- Use durations for new shares. If you are sharing so somebody can find you at a festival, set it for the weekend. Indefinite should be a deliberate choice, not the default that happened.
- Understand what the other side sees. Hide Location is invisible. Stopping sharing entirely is not. If your goal is to exit quietly, those two options behave very differently.
- Remember the 12 hour reset. This is a pause, not an off switch. If you want sharing to end, end it properly.
The other iOS 27 change people actually wanted
Almost lost in all of this is a fix Apple has been asked for since roughly the invention of the alarm clock.
iOS 27 finally separates ringtone volume from alarm and notification volume. In Settings, under Sounds and Haptics, there is a new Match Ringtone Volume toggle. Switch it off and you can set your alarm loud enough to wake you while keeping notifications quiet, instead of choosing between missing your alarm and being blasted awake by a group chat at 1am.
Seventeen years is a long wait for a second volume slider. It will probably generate less discussion than a Find My setting for surprise parties, which says something about what people actually argue about.
