By Kelvin Chan
LONDON (AP) – Smartphones are a useful tool for everyday life, but you know just about everything about you, including all the places you’ve been there.
If you use the Maps app to find a new restaurant that a friend recommended, or if your phone browser checks the price of what you saw while window shopping, your phone will track your location and let it know what information you have. You can share it with people.
Your phone uses a variety of signals to find your location, such as cell tower holes, Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth, GPS and more.
Your phone may need to know where you are to provide convenient services, such as telling your Uber driver where to pick you up. However, in other cases there is little justification for tracking your whereabouts. This could be exploited by an app, an advertising service, or hackers.
“From fitness tracking to navigation, everything can reveal details of our everyday lives and movements. This can be at risk for the wrong hands.” “Your navigation, emergency, and more. When you need to, share updates with trusted contacts, you need to turn on location tracking and disable it immediately afterwards.”
Experts can use location data to track people visiting an abortion clinic. Or, “A dissatisfied ex can steal someone using location sharing. Or, your current abusive partner can force you to share locations as a means of control ” said David Ruiz, senior privacy advocate for cybersecurity firm MalwareBytes.
Here are some tips to ensure that location tracking is minimized:
App permissions
Go to your phone’s control panel and check your permissions.
iPhone users can go to the Privacy and Security tab and then to Location Services to see their individual app settings. According to cybersecurity experts, it’s not a good idea to ensure that your app is always able to use your location in the background. Instead, ask the app first before using your location, use it only while the app is open, or try not to let your location use.
While participating in the location service, you may notice a small arrow that indicates which apps are using your location. Purple means recent, and grey indicates the past 24 hours.
There are so many different versions depending on the different device manufacturers, so it’s a little different for Android phones. Generally, go to Settings and then tap the location icon. This allows you to turn it on or off for all apps.
To fine-tune the settings for individual apps, tap App Location. Here you will see the same options as the iOS option.
iPhone Privacy
Apple has other tools that reduce the tracking of third-party items that may contain location information. iPhone privacy and security settings have a toggle under the (Tracking) tab that allows apps to request tracking. When this switch is turned off, new app requests will be automatically denied and access to your mobile phone’s ad identifier will also be stopped.
Advertising ID
Privacy experts recommend blocking internal ad identifiers for Google or Apple devices. This allows for third-party tracking on most devices, improving ad targeting.
On your iPhone, go to Privacy Settings, then scroll to Apple Ads, then turn off personalized ads. On your new Android phone, you can go to Privacy Settings, go to Ads, and tap on your Delete Ad ID.
Pinpoint or general
Whether you use Android or iOS, both can be set up to accurately identify your location by combining wireless signals with data from onboard sensors such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, and barometers. Masu. This can help you estimate the location of your phone, for example, if you are in a building blocking GPS signals.
One reason to use this function is to show you exactly who you are meeting where you are. Google says that the signal is randomized and cannot be related to a particular person or account. Either way, you may not want all apps to know about this, so you can tell your phone to only share common locations.
On Android phones, turn off the positioning accuracy setting for all apps. On your iPhone, turn individual apps on or off.
Your Google Account
In addition to app permissions on your device, we also recommend checking your Google account. Google discovered that even after opting for such tracking by disabling a feature called “Location History,” the company continued to track people’s location data, and that After the story, I was forced to be more transparent about my location tracking practices.
Go to myaccount.google.com and then go to the Data & Privacy section to find the Location History control. Recent changes will delete the history after 3 months, but you can change its default settings.
browser
Popular smartphone web browsers like Safari and Chrome can hand out your location, so try using Duckduckgo, Firefox Focus, Ecosia, etc. that don’t store information about you.
If a privacy-focused browser needs to access the location via an IP address, ask first. It also allows you to easily delete cookies and other web browsing data.
Find my device
You can also find and track my device features for Apple’s Find My or Google to recover lost devices. If you think someone can access your Apple or Google account, you can turn off this feature.
Blocks the signal
Some cybersecurity websites recommend using plane mode, but you shouldn’t rely on them as they don’t always keep out all signals.
Signal blocking Faraday pouches are a better bet, but test them to make sure they actually pack all the signals. And remember, you need to take the device out of the bag to use it.
trade off
For smartphones and other devices like smartwatches, it is difficult to provide a thorough checklist.
The default relationships with apps, businesses and platforms are for them to track us down, and “it’s absolutely hard to scrutinise every channel on which data is sent,” Ruiz says. Ta.
“The unfortunate truth is that in order to shut everything down, you need to go to the device settings, check each app line by line, and make separate decisions about how those apps collect location data. That’s it,” Ruiz said. “It’s either “or turn off all location data completely” can be inconvenient, such as manually entering addresses into the ride app or not getting live direction from the mapping app. It has sex.
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