How to know the location of a person from Android

There are many and varied reasons why we may want to know the whereabouts of a person through their telephone. It can be from an older relative who we have not known about for a long time, to a friend who does not show apparent signs of life, to give two quick examples.

No matter how laudable those reasons are, it must be borne in mind that the reasons why you want locate someone using your mobile phone they are not always so noble. We are not going to enter into value judgments, that is not our purpose. We will limit ourselves, before continuing, to remember that everyone has the right to have their privacy reviewed and that, resorting to methods such as those that we are going to give you here, should only be done in the most extreme cases. In the case of you have lost your mobile, we have a better article, dedicated to how to locate a lost or stolen mobile.

How to know the location of an Android mobile

There are different solutions that will allow you to easily know where a person’s phone is. Before continuing, let us clarify a couple of things:

• First of all, the most important thing is to be proactive. We will have to install the relevant applications on the person’s phone (if necessary), we will have to have the access credentials of their Google account or we will have to have created a personal network with it. Keep in mind that the ideal is that those whom we are going to locate know that we want to do so.
• Second, we are not going to recommend apps that promise to locate a device using the phone number. Its accuracy and usefulness is more than doubtful, apart from the fact that we could be offering personal information of third parties to opaque entities for unclear purposes. We cannot guarantee that using them is reliable or safe, so we will not discuss them.

Find my Google device, the simplest

Using this method has two major disadvantages: first, you need to have access to the Google account of the person you want to reach. The second, that if you have the phone turned off (or it has no battery), it will not detect it.

If you have access to the Google account of that someone whose location (or, at least, their phone) you want to know, you can open your Internet browser on a PC and select the device you want to find:

Selection of the device we want to find

When you do, the device’s location will appear on a map:

Device located on a map

Cerberus, a crawling classic

Cerberus is a security classic for Android and one of the most complete solutions that the market offers us. It is one of the most complete solutions, since it not only allows us to track a terminal, but also to save backup copies remotely, record audio of the environment in which our terminal is located and even automatically take photos while manipulating the device. telephone.

It is necessary to bear in mind that although downloading and installing Cerberus is completely free, you must buy a license for the device after 6 days or, otherwise, the application will be practically useless.

And how do we track a phone with Cerberus? Very easy. First, we download and install the application. Next, we grant you the permissions you request. Once this is done, we already have Cerberus running on our phone. The next step is to go to the Cerberus website from a computer, tablet or other device, and click on Log in:

Cerberus website

We will have to enter the access credentials that we will have generated when installing and configuring Cerberus. When we have validated these credentials, a map will appear on the screen with the approximate location of the terminal:

Cerberus localized device

To show us this location, Cerberus uses the terminal’s GPS. However, we can only use this app to track a terminal having previously installed it on it and knowing the username and password of the Cerberus account of the phone in question.

Lookout, more than an antivirus

Lookout began as an antivirus for Android, but today its capabilities have expanded much more, to the point of serving as a tracking tool. It is true that it is not as complete as Cerberus, but it is also true that Lookout does not force you to buy a license to use the application; the free version is sufficient.

To use Lookout, you just have to download and install the application, and grant it the permissions it requests. You have to keep in mind that this app It can’t coexist with Cerberus on your phone, so if you have it, Lookout will ask you to uninstall it (it will even do it for you).

When you’ve done this, Lookout should be perfectly configured to work. Now, as in the case of Cerberus, you must go to the Lookout website and log in with your access credentials. When you have done this, you will see the location of your terminal on a map:

Device located with Lookout

Lookout also makes use of the terminal’s GPS to get its location, which puts us in exactly the same situation as Cerberus when using it.

Family Locator, the cleanest and most moral solution

This app It is designed to create a private network with the members of a family, in such a way that we can know if someone has reached their destination after a trip, if they are already at home after a certain time or, in very extreme cases or disappearance , check the tours you have done during a day.

It is very easy to configure and start up, just install the application and follow the instructions on the screen. Members are added to each group using a code, which the user will then decide whether to use or not. This means that the people whose location we are going to know at any time allow us to voluntarily do so, and that we are not spying on them or carrying out any intrusive operation on their terminals.

Family Locator up and running

Like Cerberus, Family Locator bases its locating capabilities of our family and friends on the GPS of its terminals. In this sense, we can find other similar applications such as GPS Tracking for Mobile, which have an identical operation to Family Locator: once registered within the application, we can generate circles to invite users through a code.

Using Family Locator is free, but you have paid plans in case you need to unlock some advanced features.

Can you geolocate a person on WhatsApp?

This question appears every so often in Internet search engines, and not without a reason. It has always been heard that one of WhatsApp’s weak points was certain aspects of its security, which supposedly allowed various holes to be exploited.

In theory, through one of these supposed holes, the whereabouts of a device (and therefore its carrier) could be known through the popular messaging application. Well, we are obliged to clarify that doing this is completely impossible.

Conversation on WhatsApp

This means that any Internet source that offers to know how to locate someone for a WhatsApp conversation is blatantly lying. We recommend completely ignoring any post that says this is possible; It could be a trap for us to give away personal or third-party information for unclear purposes.

What a person can do through WhatsApp is share their location in real time with us, so that we can follow their movements for a certain period of time, but nothing more. Through the messages that we send with another person it is impossible to know their location, we want to place special emphasis on this.