Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share DP2 Limit Location Sharing on Your Smartphone
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
DP2 Limit Location Sharing on Your Smartphone
One other step to securing your privacy is to find a way to limit location sharing. These days, there are a multitude of apps that track your location and sell that information to data brokers. It’s this particular process that The New York Times outlined in an article last year.
It’s rather chilling and while companies don’t provide users names explicitly to these data brokers, it’s incredibly easy for them to figure out who that person is. After all, if you travel the same way and make the same routine stops, it’s easy for someone to piece together habits and even who you are.
On a privacy level, this is concerning and app privacy policies are generally vague about what they do with this data. That being said, there are things that we can do to limit how much data is being sent to those apps.
Your first option is make a habit of turning off location tracking when you’re not actively using your phone that requires location sharing. On iOS, go into your Settings app and click Privacy, then Location Services. From there you can turn your location off. For Android phones it’s Settings - Lock screen & security - Location to toggle location sharing off.
But that method can be bothersome for some people, especially if you use a lot of apps that require them to know where you are. So one other alternative to this is limit how much apps have access to your data.
If you’re an iOS user, you can restrict specific apps from getting data while they are running. To do this, go back to the Location Services privacy menu and tap on each app you want and change when it’s taking data from you. If you want to restrict it, tap it once to turn it to “While Using the App.” To block it completely from tracking, set it to “Never.”
For Android, your only options are tracking you completely or tracking nothing at all. You can still select specific apps that you can disallow and whether you want to do that or not is up to you. If you want to block apps completely from tracking you, tap “app-level permissions” from the Location security menu and use the slider to turn it on or off.
View all episodes
By dpappOne other step to securing your privacy is to find a way to limit location sharing. These days, there are a multitude of apps that track your location and sell that information to data brokers. It’s this particular process that The New York Times outlined in an article last year.
It’s rather chilling and while companies don’t provide users names explicitly to these data brokers, it’s incredibly easy for them to figure out who that person is. After all, if you travel the same way and make the same routine stops, it’s easy for someone to piece together habits and even who you are.
On a privacy level, this is concerning and app privacy policies are generally vague about what they do with this data. That being said, there are things that we can do to limit how much data is being sent to those apps.
Your first option is make a habit of turning off location tracking when you’re not actively using your phone that requires location sharing. On iOS, go into your Settings app and click Privacy, then Location Services. From there you can turn your location off. For Android phones it’s Settings - Lock screen & security - Location to toggle location sharing off.
But that method can be bothersome for some people, especially if you use a lot of apps that require them to know where you are. So one other alternative to this is limit how much apps have access to your data.
If you’re an iOS user, you can restrict specific apps from getting data while they are running. To do this, go back to the Location Services privacy menu and tap on each app you want and change when it’s taking data from you. If you want to restrict it, tap it once to turn it to “While Using the App.” To block it completely from tracking, set it to “Never.”
For Android, your only options are tracking you completely or tracking nothing at all. You can still select specific apps that you can disallow and whether you want to do that or not is up to you. If you want to block apps completely from tracking you, tap “app-level permissions” from the Location security menu and use the slider to turn it on or off.