Family Safety location tracking not working

Anonymous
2023-03-05T01:16:51+00:00

Hello. I have two children with Android phones (Samsung S21's). We have used Microsoft Family Safety for a few years and location tracking has worked perfectly until a few weeks ago when it stopped updating their locations.

I looked at every setting on both their phones, making sure all of the recommended location settings, security settings, battery settings were correct. Still couldn't get their location which showed they were both "In the house" when they were actually at school.

I uninstalled the app from both phones and reinstalled it. I followed all of the security prompts for the recommended settings. Both phones started to report their location again.

However... one of my children is on a school trip. Their phone last reported in five hours ago from a service station 250 miles away. They are now at their destination, but the Microsoft Family Safety app still shows them where they were five hours ago (extremely worrying for a parent).

Looks like the probkem has happened again. This must be a Microsoft problem What are the chances of both my kids phones stopping reporting their location at exactly the same time?

Come on Microsoft please fix this. Our children are very important to us and the app is called Microsoft "Family Safety".

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Family and online safety

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-03-05T10:16:54+00:00

    Hello The Daddy UK,

    Welcome to Microsoft Community.

    Thank you for your support of Microsoft products. I fully understand your concern for your two children as a father.

    We do receive a lot of feedback from users about the family group and family security features, such as not being able to add a child's account to the family group, not being able to delete administrator permissions, or not being able to perform any actions, such as "It's not you,it's us", etc.

    Microsoft's servers may be experiencing some temporary glitches that are causing the problems, including the fact that the family security app's display location is no longer updated.

    I deeply understand the inconvenience this problem has caused you. Microsoft is aware of this problem and has arranged engineers to investigate the problem. Please wait patiently for the problem to be fixed.

    Here is a small suggestion I can give you. Perhaps you could replace the home safety feature by calling your child at the same time every day.

    Please allow me to apologize again for the inconvenience.

    Best regards,

    Mitchell - | Microsoft community support expert from MSFT

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-03-07T01:26:22+00:00

    This problem seems to be happening for the Samsung GS 22 phones in my family. Problem just started a few weeks ago. I also have iPones in my family. This is not an issue for the iPhones. I can see the location of my kids with iPones in Family Safety with no issue. The location is updating fine and quickly for iPhones. The location of the Android GS 22 phones is not updating even close to real time. Sometimes it takes days for the update. Not sure if the problem is on the GS 22 phones or someplace on Microsoft servers. When I look at the permissions of Family Safety on the GS 22 phones, the location permission is set to "Allowed all the time" and it says that Family Safety accessed the location within a minute of me checking this permission. However, when I look in Family Safety for that same phone, the location is days old. I am one of the admins of the Family Safety account. I have one of the two GS22 phones in the family. The other admin uses an iPhone and has the same experience as me when using Family Safety. The iPhone admin can see location of iphones accurately but the GS 22 locations are days old.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-03-08T12:42:50+00:00

    We are also seeing a complete breakdown on the location tracking, including driving reports on our three android Pixel 6 phones. This is happening on both Android 12 and Android 13. The issue seems to have impacted each phone at a different time. The first phone stopped interacting with location services 27 days ago. The second phone stopped 12 days ago and the last one stopped reporting location and driving feedback 7 days ago.

    As others have reported, we have also verified all appropriate permissions have been granted, battery optimization is disabled, but still the location has not changed from "Home" for two weeks.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-03-09T04:02:29+00:00

    Same here, stopped reporting location on 2 Samsung S21. Other 2 Android phones are working fine.

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