I have never been much of a user of the device location services provided by Google and Apple with their Find My Device services.
Not having any way to remotely erase my phone I am a bit careful about putting data on my phone because I am concerned that if it was stolen someone might be able to get into it. I don’t really want to use Google’s Find My Device feature because then they would have to know my location all the time and that is a bit too privacy invasive. Are there any good FOSS alternatives that can have similar feature parity to Apple and Google’s offerings?
I have never lost a device before so this isn’t a massive worry but is it really worth it to have my location possibly recorded all the time for a bit more peace of mind?
Do you use a ‘Find my device’ service if so what do you use?
I personally host a FindMyDeviceServer which you can use with the FindMyDevice App (available on fdroid).
The app allows you to do many things like locate your device, make pictures with the camera, let your phone ring, show alerts on the screen, lock the phone, wipe the device etc. You can control all that either via SMS (whitelisted contacts) or via the web UI of the FMD-Server.
I host it myself for a couple of months/years by now. Back then they sadly didnt have a docker compose file available so self hosting the server was a bit of pain. There is an open issue on their gitlab working on a docker compose file releasing soon™.
The data is end-to-end encryrypted, so using any public instance should be fine.
If you plan to selfhost, i’d wait until the docker compose is ready.
Keep in mind that this is still under development so you may find bugs, do report them in their gitlab issues tho^^.