An extensive survey by The New York Times once again proves that iOS and Android apps collect and share user location data on a large scale with businesses. What can you do best about this?
Share less iPhone location data: that’s how you do it
With the research shows The New York Times indicates that a lot of the apps on your iPhone are watching you, trying to collect data all day long. This is often justified with the idea that the data is ‘anonymous’, so that a company does not know that the data belongs to you.
In practice, this is less rosy, according to the research. Because our habits are so specific and unique and so many different types of data are recorded, all this anonymous data can be traced back to a person with a little effort. This anonymized data can still be used to track an individual.
That is of course not very strange. An iPhone is a device that you always take with you, with a built-in GPS chip that keeps track of your location and a chip that can send this information to third parties via mobile internet. These apps make a lot of money with that, because they can sell the data to advertisers.
This way, you can restrict sharing of iPhone location services
Fortunately, Apple makes it a lot easier than Android to do something about this on iOS. You can set per app whether the service may collect location data.
1. What is an app for and is it completely free?
Many of the most popular apps in the App Store are free, but looks can be deceiving. It is precisely these applications that are made to collect your data and sell it to advertisers or other companies. For example, the investigation shows that free weather, flashlight and sports score apps are guilty of this.
So ask yourself why an app is free. Is it an extension of a service you pay for? Or is the app completely free to use and there are hardly any in-app purchases? In the latter case, the developer is probably trying to make money by collecting data from as many people as possible.
2. Check location services per app
Apple has added a handy setting in iOS to regulate iPhone location services on a per-app basis. This works as follows.
- Open the Settings app;
- Tap Privacy;
- Choose ‘Location Services’;
- Change the settings per app by tapping the name.
You can now browse all the apps on your iPhone or iPad to see how much freedom they have to record and collect your location data.
3. Turn location services off or on ‘when using’
The next step is to choose the correct setting for each app. Apple makes it mandatory for every app to give you three options: ‘Never’, ‘When using the app’ and ‘Always’.
- Never: the app can never view or collect your location data
- When using: the app can only view and collect location data if you have the app open
- Always: regardless of whether the app is open or closed, the app can always keep an eye on your location data
In order to optimally protect your privacy, you can of course choose the option ‘never’ as the best option, but this limits the functionality of many apps. For example, Google Maps becomes unusable without location data.
That’s why we recommend choosing ‘never’ only for apps that don’t need your location to fulfill their purpose. For example, a flashlight app does not need to know where you are. Almost all of the other apps can be set to ‘when using’, which limits the times when data can be collected.
4. Remove suspicious or unused apps
The hallmark of many free apps that are meant to collect your data is that they only have a limited function. These are often apps that you start a few times and then leave behind. Depending on the amount of apps on your iPhone, we recommend that you take a critical look at this.
Do you not or hardly use an app, or do you not completely trust it? Then it is better to remove it and see if an Apple app or a website fulfills a similar function. It’s a good idea to periodically scroll through your list of apps to see which ones you can and don’t allow access to this data, and whether they’re still worth keeping on your iPhone. This way you not only tidy up your device and free up space, but you also handle your data more carefully.