KEEP your personal information on your iPhone safe by avoiding wide open access to various apps with these important tips.
When downloading new apps on your phone, you will often be asked if the application can access or “track” your data.
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Many iPhone users can just click “allow” to access the app, but doing so can put personal information – as well as those of those close to you – at risk.
In particular, the data may be shared without your knowledge with digital markup, advertising or technology companies.
Tech outlet CNET released a number of tips this week for iPhone users to protect this data.
Within the iPhone’s settings menu, users can access a separate privacy menu.
There they can click on various applications and functions – such as the agenda, contacts, photos, Bluetooth and camera – and see for which separate apps “access has been requested”.
Users then have the option to deselect any application they wish to lose access to.
In addition, users can prevent applications from using their iPhone location services data.
At the top of the privacy menu is a “Location Services” button.
By tapping that, users can see all the applications on their phone that have access to location services and how much access they’ve been given, such as “while using.”
They can also see via various arrows next to the app how often the apps use location services.
A hollow purple arrow indicates that the app can receive the data under certain conditions.
A full purple arrow indicates that the app has recently used the user’s location, and a full gray arrow indicates that the app has used the user’s location in the last 24 hours.
If an iPhone user wants to turn off their location services completely, they can do so by tapping the slider at the top of the screen.
Another setting that users can change to protect their data is to turn off Apple Advertising.
The option can also be found in the Privacy menu.
After clicking “Apple Advertising”, users can disable the feature to avoid personalized and targeted ads.
While these targeted ads may worry users, Apple emphasizes in the settings menu that the platform “does not track” its users.
“It’s designed to protect your privacy and doesn’t track you through apps and websites owned by other companies,” the advisory reads.
If users want to further track how different apps on their iPhones access their data, such as location services, they can do so by enabling the App Privacy Report in the Privacy menu.
By enabling the report, users can see a “breakdown” of which applications use or share the most personal data and other activities.