Where your child is

obacht can show you where your child's phone is. It is off for every child until you turn it on, and your child's phone always shows that it is on, how much you see, and when you last asked. obacht is about limits, not surveillance: pick the least you need.

Location works on Android phones. Windows PCs, TVs and consoles don't send a position.

Choosing how much you see

Open the child, then Settings → Location, and pick one:

• Off (the default): the phone sends nothing and obacht stores nothing. Turning it off later deletes every position obacht kept.
• When you ask: the phone sends its position only when you tap Ask now on the child's Today tab. obacht keeps only the latest position of each phone.
• Last known position: the phone sends its position every 15 minutes, and when you ask. obacht keeps only the latest one, so you see where the phone was last, never where it has been.
• With history: like the last known position, but obacht keeps every position for 1 to 30 days (you choose; 1 day by default), so you can see the way to school or back from training. Handy for younger children; older ones may rightly find it too much.

Switching from history to another choice deletes all but each phone's latest position. Positions older than the kept days are deleted every hour.

Seeing where your child is

The child's Today tab shows Where is …? while location is on: each phone's latest position, how long ago and how accurate it was, and a link that opens it on OpenStreetMap. Ask now asks the phones for a fresh position; it appears within a minute when the phone is online. With history, the positions are listed by day.

obacht itself shows no map: a map would load its pictures from a map service, which would learn where your child is. The link opens OpenStreetMap only when you tap it.

What your child sees

On the phone, obacht's card "What your parents see" says whether you can see where the phone is and how (when you ask, last known position, with history and for how many days), when you last asked, and when the phone last sent its position. A child with their own login sees the same positions you do.

Setting up the phone

The phone needs the location permission, Allow all the time, because obacht sends the position while the child uses other apps. When you turn location on, the phone's obacht app shows a button to allow it. On phones set up as a managed device (the owner version) obacht grants the permission itself where Android lets it.

If the permission is missing or location is switched off on the phone, you see "Location is off" on the Devices tab and get a notification, like other problems with a phone's protection.

Through the API

Everything above works through the API too, for your own tools: location_mode and location_history_days on PATCH /api/v1/children/{id}, GET /api/v1/children/{id}/location and POST /api/v1/children/{id}/location/request. See /api/v1/openapi.json on your server.

This page is part of obacht's documentation, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source on GitHub · CC BY 4.0 · Version: main (2ab2740)