Share a live location for a short time

When a moving dot is genuinely useful

Use it for a temporary, consent-based handoff. It works well when two people are finding each other in a large park, a driver is approaching an agreed pickup place, a group is reconnecting after an event, or a family member wants to show that they are on the way. In each case, the shared person knows the link exists and can stop it from the same page.

Do not use it for hidden tracking, a child-safety substitute, an employee-monitoring system, or an emergency plan. The tool does not run reliably in every backgrounded browser and it cannot prove where a person is. It is intentionally short-lived because the right default for a location share is a clear end, not an open-ended stream.

For a fixed meeting spot, delivery area, or service boundary, a radius map is the better tool. It lets you create a circle around a chosen point without requesting live location permission. If you are sharing a photo from that place, the photo metadata cleaner can make a local copy without embedded GPS information before you send it.

What the person receiving the link sees

The recipient opens one private page with a map, the most recent signal status, the reported accuracy, and the expiry time. The viewer refreshes about every five seconds while the page is open. It does not need an account, application download, or a LocateKit profile.

A green pin is an approximate location, not a promise that somebody is standing at the exact point. Phone and browser location can be less precise indoors, near tall buildings, with a weak signal, or when the device relies on a nearby network instead of GPS. The tool shows the browser-reported accuracy so the viewer has context instead of a false sense of precision.

Private still does not mean safe to forward. The full link is the capability to view the session. Send it in a message thread you trust, avoid placing it in a public post or shared document, and stop the session when the coordination job is finished.

Keep the sender page active while sharing

The sender browser supplies the updates. It watches for a new browser location and sends the latest point to the private session. If the browser is closed, the phone locks, a battery-saving rule intervenes, or a connection drops, the recipient may keep seeing the last signal rather than a moving dot.

That is normal browser behavior, so the viewer page says when a signal is older than 45 seconds. If a share is important, keep the page open, glance at its status after moving, and agree on a normal message or call as a backup. The expiry is still enforced even if the sender goes offline.

This is also why no map should be mistaken for emergency evidence. A temporary sharing link can support an ordinary plan between consenting people, but it cannot replace a phone call, an official location-sharing service, or emergency services.

How this private link handles location data

The live-sharing page is treated as a sensitive tool. It does not load advertising or session-recording scripts, and it applies a no-referrer policy so an opened viewer page does not pass its address on as a referrer. The map itself uses MapLibre with Esri street tiles.

LocateKit stores only the most recent position for the short session you create. It does not build a timeline of older positions. The link expires at the time you select, and stopping the share asks the server to delete it immediately. You remain responsible for choosing a trustworthy recipient and ending the share when it has served its purpose.