I’m working on a project where I need to track the real-time location of 5 Samsung SmartTags (or SmartThings-compatible trackers) and display their positions on a public website. Additionally, I want to store their location data every hour in a database for historical records.
I’ve been looking through the SmartThings API documentation, but I couldn’t find any clear information on whether it’s possible to retrieve the location data of SmartTags programmatically via the API.
Has anyone here successfully done this before?
Is it possible to get location data for SmartTags via SmartThings API or any other official (or safe workaround) integration?
Any advice, examples, or pointers would be greatly appreciated!
There is very little about SmartTags that is exposed via the ST API. There are been numerous discussions over the years that, while there have been proposals about populating tag info via the API, nothing has ever happened. There is also speculation that there are privacy concerns with making location information available as well.
This has always been the puzzling thing with the SmartTags. As SmartThings devices they have had the geolocation capability since day one but it has never been populated. It may be that SmartThings has layers of access control that are a mystery to end users and that the data is there but simply not visible. Or it simply isn’t there at all, in which case why have the capability?
At an early stage enquiries made on behalf of users met with the response that there were considerable hurdles in the way of making that data available, with regard to privacy and the like. I was always a bit sceptical about this but more recently I’ve softened my view a bit. If location data is considered as personal data, could Samsung sensibly let it outside of their control?
