They say it’s a coincidence. They say it’s because you looked for it before.
But Apple agreed Pay $95 million to settle a class action lawsuit over Siri’s privacy concerns…so if you’re concerned, there are several settings on your phone that you need to change.
🍎📱 Most of the instructions below are for iOS because we only have iPhones in our house. Usually you can find similar settings for Andriod devices too.
Table of contents
Turn off the microphone
Your phone’s microphone is listening to you and not just wake-up words like “Hey Alexa” or “OK Google” — and you may have accidentally given access to apps without realizing it.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone to see a list of all apps with access to your microphone. Cut off those who don’t need it.
Be strict about Bluetooth
Bluetooth can be used to track your location while you are in the store using something called Bluetooth pingers. Often it is integrated with their mobile apps and is used to track your location, send you promotions, or help you navigate the store. This New York Times article explains how it works.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Bluetooth and disable it for apps that don’t really need it.
Disable analytics and improvements
You may want to be nice and share analytics and improvements so that Apple can improve Siri, its dictation, and other services, but it leaves you open to collecting data about movement patterns, app usage, and other items.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements and disable:
- Share iPhone analytics
- Share iCloud Analytics
- Improve Siri & Dictation (go to Settings → Siri & Search → Siri History to delete voice history)
- Enhance assistive voice functions
- Improve AR location accuracy
Disable precise location tracking
Precise location is scary accurate when it can use GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It can reduce the depth to 3-6 meters so they know which building you are in (although not necessarily which floor).
How many apps need that level of accuracy? I wouldn’t argue. You can change the setting from Precise location to Estimated, which will display a large blue circle spanning several miles.
Disable background app refreshing
Background app refresh is when apps are allowed to update their data in the background, slowly draining your battery but also your privacy. Every time it goes to retrieve data, it connects to a tower and provides information and status of your device.
Go to Settings → General → Background App Refresh and turn it off. Your apps refresh when you open them.
Disable tracking between apps
This is where your phone is connected to your desktop, which is connected to your smart TV, etc. It’s linked together through your various logins and allows companies to build a complete profile of you across devices.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking and disable Allow apps to request tracking. There is little benefit in turning this on unless you really want to see better targeted ads.
As an added bonus, you can also remove ad personalization IDs. If your phone is a unique advertising identifier used in apps, you can disable this ‘Personalized Ads’ by going to Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising (it’s at the very bottom) and turning off Personalized Ads.
Delete important locations
Your phone keeps a list of places you often visit (and how you get there) and you might not even know it. It’s hidden deep in the settings (you know what I mean) and may be enabled by default.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → System Services → Important Locations & Routes
When you are in the Location Services section, you will need to scroll all the way to the bottompast each app on your phone to find System Services! Clear the history and disable it.
Check camera permissions
Just like with your microphone, you should limit which apps can access your camera. Meta/Facebook rolled out a feature last year where this would be the case scan your photo album to help train its AI, and it received a lot of backlash. Companies are constantly changing their terms and conditions and the only way to prevent them from scanning your photo album is to not allow access in the first place.
Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos and check which apps have access and whether they really need it.
#stop #phone #bugging