In 2019, a Washington Post article by Geoffrey Fowler described the author’s shock to discover how many of his iPhone apps were collecting and uploading information about their use while he was sleeping.
As we all know, data is a great asset these days. If you use a phone, laptop, or any computing device (unless you are a high-level security buff or hacker with access to sophisticated blocking tools), you are paying for your applications by providing the business with marketing information and more available to supply them. As Fowler’s article demonstrated, iPhone users are not immune to it. Since publishing his article, Apple has made some commendable changes to its privacy policy. But it’s still a good idea to take responsibility for your own data. There are some simple ways to minimize the amount of monitoring that application providers can do and the amount of data that they can access.
However, according to Apple’s Advertising and Privacy page: , the page goes on to say that contextual data such as information about your device, your location, your searches in the App Store, and what you read in Apple News could be collected. You can work around this a bit by turning off personalized and location-based ads.
“Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.”
Turn off Personalized Ads
- Select your app from Settings, tap Privacy, scroll down and select Apple Advertising (it’s at the bottom of the list). Disable “personalized ads”.
- You can opt out of receiving personalized advertising from Apple. You can also disable location services
- You can also disable location services.
Turn off Location Based Ads
- Go to Settings> Privacy> Location Services (at the top of the screen). Disable “Location Services”.
- You can also change several of your applications on this page, p. Eg B. the App Store or Maps to never allow access to the location, the next time you ask or while using the application.
- Also note that you can still use the Find My Items feature.
- This will activate location services temporarily. If you want to see how effectively your phone is protected, you can take the Panopticlick test offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We also recommend you use a reliable ad blocker for iPhone that can tackle all annoying ads and pop-ups on your device.
