Find My in iOS 27 has a middle setting between sharing your location with a friend and cutting them off. Open the person’s card in the People list, tap the More button, then tap Hide Location, and sharing with that one person pauses while everyone else keeps seeing you.
Until now Apple’s guide documented two options: keep sharing, or Stop Sharing My Location, which removes you from that person’s map in a way they can notice. Hide Location is the third, and it appears in the iOS 27 guide with no equivalent in the iOS 26 version of the same page.
How to pause sharing with one person
- Open the Find My app on your iPhone.
- Tap People.
- “Tap the name of the person you want to pause sharing your location with.”
- Tap the More button, then tap Hide Location.
Apple prints that fourth step as an icon, captioned the More button in its own artwork, so look for the control on the card rather than for the words. Hide Location appears in the list once you tap it.
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Be careful about what you assume from here. Apple does not say what the other person sees while your location is hidden, does not say whether they are told, does not say how long the pause lasts, and does not give the step for ending it. Do not treat this as an invisible switch. Treat it as a pause whose effects on the other end Apple has not described, and test it with someone who will tell you what changed on their screen.
The two options either side of it
Apple keeps both of the older choices on the same page, in these words:
- Stop sharing with one friend: tap People, tap the person’s name, “Tap Stop Sharing My Location, then tap Stop Sharing Location.”
- Hide your location from everyone: tap Me, “then turn off Share My Location.”
The difference is scope and permanence. Stop Sharing ends the arrangement and the other person would have to ask again. Turning off Share My Location under Me takes you off every map at once, including family members who may depend on it. Hide Location is the surgical one.
Set an end time when you start sharing
The same page also lets you decide up front how long sharing lasts. Apple’s steps for sharing with someone new are to tap People, tap the Add button, then choose Share My Location, enter the person in the With field, tap Done, and then “choose how long you want to share your location”.
The useful part is Apple’s tip underneath: “Set a duration or an end time for your location sharing by choosing Custom and adjusting the fields.” Custom gives you an exact stop point instead of one of the presets, so sharing for a trip or an evening out expires on its own. That is the opposite end of the same problem Hide Location solves: one decides in advance, the other decides later.
Check which device is doing the sharing
A detail that catches people out: your location is not always coming from the iPhone in your hand. Apple says “the device sharing your location appears next to Sharing From”, and that if your iPhone is not currently the one sharing, “you can tap Use This iPhone as My Location”. Both sit under the Me tab.
There is also an Apple Watch rule worth knowing. In Apple’s wording, if you share your location from an iPhone paired with an Apple Watch on GPS and Cellular models, “your location is shared from your Apple Watch when you’re out of range of your iPhone and Apple Watch is on your wrist”. That is a cellular-model condition, not something every Watch does.
One more thing to rule out if a friend says they cannot see you at all. Apple’s note on the page sends you to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Find My to confirm Location Services is on for the app. A hidden location and a switched-off one look identical from the other side.
Who this is actually for
Most people who want to disappear from a friend’s map do not want a confrontation about it, and the blunt option has always created one. A pause you can set from the person’s own card, leaving the rest of your sharing untouched, covers the ordinary case: a day you would rather not explain, a group you joined for one weekend, a colleague who never stopped following your commute.
Find My was one of many apps reworked for the September 14 release, and our iOS 27 release rundown covers the rest. If the cellular condition above matters to you, the Apple Watch Ultra 4 specifications spell out what that model carries.
