It feels like your smartphone has telepathic abilities. How weird it is that talking about your new shoes turns into advertising promotion of the sneakers in Instagram several minutes after your discussion. With all these trackers, cookies, and data brokers, it seems to be impossible to protect your privacy in the digital world. Sounds like a spy thriller but in fact, it is a boring process. Nevertheless, no professional skills of hacker are needed to protect your privacy online.
Today, both Apple and Google realize that privacy sells smartphones and make awesome dashboards in the settings menu of your device. The only thing you should do is to know where to find it. You may think about it as a feed of the security camera on your personal data. You may be surprised to find out how often applications check your location when you are not even using the device.
Let us talk about iPhone first of all. As you probably know, Apple promotes its privacy protection features. First of all, you should enter the Settings menu of your smartphone and open the Privacy & Security section. This category is usually located pretty high in the hierarchy of categories, after the General one.
The next step is to go to the list of permissions, which will give you the possibility to manage your privacy settings. The list includes permissions related to your Location Services, Contacts, Photos, Camera, Microphone, and other features. This list is the key to protecting your privacy online.
The key feature of your iPhone when managing your privacy settings is the App Privacy Report. But you should enable it manually. To do so, enter Settings → Privacy & Security → App Privacy Report and turn this option ON. It takes a week for the report to become interesting.
When you have done it, you will see what applications are accessing your sensors. For example, such application as flashlight will ask you to grant the permissions regarding your contacts and your location. Frankly speaking, it is quite creepy behavior of the developers. Furthermore, the report shows the network activity, in other words, the list of the internet domains with which your applications communicate. Thus, when you see that your favorite game contacts fifty ad trackers, you should uninstall it immediately.
Nevertheless, the Android users have the possibility to check their privacy settings of the device too. Google created the Privacy Dashboard. To see it, you should enter the Settings menu of your smartphone and select the Privacy section. The icon of this section may depend on the model of your device – it looks like a hand or a shield.
When you tap it, you will see the timeline of the last 24 hours. This timeline is visual and easy-to-understand. For example, there will be a pie chart of the usage of your phone sensors. Usually, it includes camera and microphone but sometimes the location bar is activated too. You may tap any of these bars and see the list of applications which used this sensor within the certain period of time. For example, the usage of your microphone at 3 am may be quite suspicious.
In case with Androids, you will be able to revoke any permission from an application with one tap. If an application behaves strangely, just deny its access to your camera or to your contacts list. It is your device and you are the bouncer in the club. Do not feel guilty when blocking applications that are using too much of your data – they are trying to sell something to you.
However, it is not only about smartphones. The web browser is another place to protect your privacy. In case with Google Chrome, you should insert chrome://settings/content into the address bar and see the list of the site settings. In this list, you will be able to block the third-party cookies, which are used to track and sell your data.
Privacy Report of Safari on Mac is much more user-friendly. You should just click on the shield icon in the address bar when you are visiting any site. Then, you will see the number of trackers that was blocked on this specific site. It is quite entertaining to watch how many trackers the news site wants to load to your computer. Some sites are just crazy with collecting your data.
Moreover, Windows 11 also has the Privacy & Security section in the main settings menu. In this section, you will be able to see the activity history and understand what information is being collected about you. It is worth checking even if you use your PC just for studying and gaming. In this section, you will be able to block the advertising ID tracking, in other words, stop Windows from showing the personalized ads for you.
The point is that it may be a bit scary to look at all this data. You will be shocked to find out how much information is being leaked from your devices every day. It feels like you are walking around with an open book. Nevertheless, the knowledge is power, and now you have a map of the labyrinth. Now, you can finally see these invisible hands that try to reach for your personal data.
The more often you start checking your dashboards, the more often you will be able to detect suspicious applications. For example, a calculator application does not need to access your photo storage. You will understand that something is wrong with it and refuse it the permission. It is a very simple habit that protects you a lot.
Imagine that it is like cleaning your room. No one likes doing it but you will feel much better once it is done. You do not need to be paranoid about it, you just need to be aware of what is going on. It will take you just five minutes per month to check your privacy dashboard.
So, go ahead and check your privacy settings today. Do not accept the default options provided by the tech giants. Protect your own data and block these invisible trackers in the process. You will be shocked by the things that you will find there and it really feels great to kick out an annoying application from your personal space.
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