Transcription
Is your iPhone listening to you? The short answer is yes and no at the same time.
Now, depending on your specific settings, your iPhone could be listening to you, but it also could be tracking you through a number of different instances. Maybe you're talking about buying a new TV and you see a bunch of ads pop up for a TV. Or you're taking a trip, maybe to Miami or New York City, and again, you see flights or hotels for New York City after you've done that. We've all been there and experienced that.
I'm going to walk you through why that is and what settings to change on your iPhone to make sure it is not listening to you, but also not tracking you through a variety of different apps and settings on your iPhone. I'm going to walk you through all that, but first, hit the subscribe button down below. It really helps me out. Thanks, guys.
Now, let's first head into the settings app on your iPhone. From the settings app on your iPhone, we're going to scroll down here and we're looking for the option that says privacy and security. Tap on that.
Now, the first and obvious one is to check to see if any apps are using your microphone that you don't want to use your microphone. So, let's scroll down here and tap on microphone. Now, keep in mind, are these apps just randomly listening into your conversations in the background? Most likely not. That would be a huge violation and a big red flag. But the most important thing is that the apps don't necessarily need to, because there are other ways that they can track you and find out your personal information. All better to sell you ads. However, it's good on here to review this. For instance, Google Maps. I don't need to access my microphone. And you just want to go through here, turn off anything that you don't want to have access to that microphone.
Now, let's go back one. We're still in the privacy and security part of your settings, but we're going to scroll down to the very bottom and tap on analytics and improvements. Now, from here, there are a couple of key ones that I would have you look at. You can see improve handwashing. And if you tap on about and improve handwashing, essentially what this does is when you're washing your hands in the bathroom, it will take some motion and audio data from your phone or Apple Watch and essentially process that and send it to Apple. Again, this is a huge violation in your privacy. I'm not really sure why this is even included on your iPhone. It says at the top here, the collected audio files will not exceed 60 seconds, etc. Basically, I don't want Apple doing anything when I'm washing my hands in the bathroom. So, I would recommend turning that off.
You can see improve Siri and dictation. Again, they'll send audio recordings to Apple. These are anonymized and essentially there's no recognition of you, but again, I don't feel great about a trillion-dollar company having all of my audio recordings sent to them. So, I would turn that off. Basically, I would turn off all of these things. There's no reason why you necessarily need Apple to share all of your analytics or see all of your analytics on your phone, how you use it. iCloud analytics, Apple Pay, Fitness, Siri, all of those. I would turn them off.
Now, after you've done that, let's go back to the very beginning of your settings because there are other things we want to check as well. At the very beginning of your settings, let's scroll down. And on here you're going to look for where is it? There it is. Apple intelligence or Siri or it might say Siri and search. Now from here you can tap on talk and type to Siri. Now depending on your preference, you can have Hey Siri turned on. Essentially this will listen for Hey Siri. Keep in mind this isn't listening to all of your conversations. It's just listening for those specific words. But in my case, I usually just switch this off because I can just always press that side button if I want Siri to be turned on.
Now, keep in mind, as I talked about, there are a number of other ways your iPhone can track you and can track what you're doing. Again, when you search for something or most likely when someone else searches for something, even in your same IP address location, it will pop up as it's been tracked. So, for instance, if I scroll down to the very bottom of my settings and tap on apps at the bottom and now go to Safari, the key thing here is that if you scroll all the way down, tap on Safari and I'll show you a really important setting. It is prevent cross-site tracking. So, if you turn this on, it will prevent your iPhone or any iPhone from having one website that you visit. Let's say you're on Best Buy looking at TVs. This will prevent all of that ad information about that you're looking for TVs and sharing it with another app like Facebook.com or Facebook or anything else or Google.
Now, keep in mind by turning this on, it will prevent and kind of silo all that information. So, you search for a TV on bestbuy.com, it won't go anywhere else. It'll just be on bestbuy.com. It won't be sold to other people that you're looking for a TV. However, let's go back one because you also want to do the same thing for Google Chrome. So, let's scroll up until we find Chrome on this list and it has the same thing. Allow cross-site tracking. I'm going to turn this off.
Now that we've done that, you also want to make sure that apps aren't tracking from one app to another one. Now, Facebook, aka Meta, threw a huge fit when Apple decided to build this into the iPhone, essentially saying it was going to be the end of advertising and their revenues were going to plummet.
Now, from here, at the very beginning of your settings, you're going to scroll down and you're going to find privacy and security. Again, tap on that. And from here, you're going to tap on tracking. Now, if you have this turned on, allow apps to request to track your specific iPhone across apps. And maybe you have apps that have access that or requested that. I would recommend turning this off. Again, there's no reason why you need apps like Facebook to be able to track between Facebook and another app your activity just to sell you better ads.
However, there are other things that you want to do as well. I would go back one and tap on location services. Now, within the location services, this is a big one as well. These are all of the apps that are using your location. So, they don't necessarily need to be listening into you. If they know that you are in a Best Buy, then they know to show you Best Buy ads or they know that you're looking for electronics, etc. And the same thing if you go to New York City, they'll know that you're in New York City to show you ads, restaurants, etc. in New York City. So on all of these, I would switch this to as limited as you can. If there's a little arrow next to it, that indicates that it's user location recently. So on any of these different ones, you can switch this to never. And then on a lot of these, switch it to never. Keep in mind, some might ask to let you always use your location. Absolutely do not do that. You can always switch this to while using the app or never. Never allow it to always use your location. You can see as soon as I switched it to always, it immediately popped up and started tracking my location in Google Maps.
Now, after we've done that, we also want to go down to the very bottom. Tap on system services. This is your iPhone tracking your location. There's some things that are really helpful here. I would basically mimic the settings that I have here. Turn off the settings that I have turned off. Turn on the settings that I have turned on. An important one at the bottom is you want to turn off all the product improvement. And for significant locations, you want that to be turned off as well. There's no reason your iPhone should track your significant locations and routes where you travel to often, what houses you're in, what businesses you're in often.
Now that we've done that, essentially you can hop out of the settings app. But there are other apps that are huge culprits in terms of tracking you, not necessarily listening in, but tracking your activity. So, let's hop into Facebook first, then we'll do Instagram and Amazon, which are huge culprits. And essentially, you can always limit their ability or at least silo their ability to track you and advertise you.
So, from Facebook, tap on the menu button at the bottom right, and then we're going to scroll down, tap on settings and privacy, and tap on settings. Now, from here, you're going to tap on see more in account center at the very top. And from here, you can see at the bottom is ad preferences. So just tap on ad preferences. Now across all of these, you're going to hit manage info and go through all of these. You can see categories used to reach you. You can see a variety of different categories. I would hit remove and remove and just go through this entire list essentially removing all of the things that they have used to better advertise to. But you also want to go back out of here and for instance in activity from our ad partners, you can go to review settings here and if you have this set to yes, show me ads that are more relevant. Essentially, this will allow you to see better ads that are more relevant. But on the flip side, the underlying thing is that Facebook will be able to track you better and use more of your information from their ad partners. All these other companies that are tracking your information and they'll be able to use that to show you ads. So, I would switch this to no, don't make my ads more relevant.
Now, let's go back out of here because you also want to go for instance to ads from ad partners. And on here, instead of show me ads from ad partners, I would switch it to no, don't show me ads. Ads about Meta. Again, don't use my activity to show me ads about Meta. You're essentially going to go through all of these different things and turn them all off.
Now, after you've done that, let's hop into the Instagram app and do something similar. Tap on the profile button at the bottom right. Next, let's tap on those three lines at the top right. From here, tap on account center at the very top like we did before. And then from here, again, tap on ad preferences. Now, it'll look fairly similar. Let's tap on manage info at the top right. And again on all of these, I would switch them if you go into those essentially to turn them off. You can see audience-based advertising. All of the companies that have you on lists that are advertising you, you can turn those off. You can also go back to all of these different things and turn them off. You can see, for instance, show social interactions on here. Essentially, it will allow you to turn off the ability to have your social interactions, basically what your friends are doing that might be nearby you and how that influences you. Again, switch this to only me on all of these. So, go through all of these and make it as restrictive as possible.
After you've done that, I would highly recommend also opening up the Amazon app on your iPhone or Android and making sure you're limiting the ability for Amazon to advertise you and track you as well. To do that, you're going to tap on those three lines at the bottom right. And then at the very top, we're going to swipe over to get to account. And now from account, let's scroll down. Now, one thing I would recommend doing under personalized content, you can see all of this personalized content, including your shopping preferences, for instance, clothing and shoes. It here even guesses my height and my weight and basically my clothing, all of that stuff. I would turn off all of those or at least delete all those. However, the most important thing is to go down here towards the bottom and you can see under personalized content, you can see app preferences. You're going to go to your ads privacy choices. Tap on that. From here, I would instead of allowing cross-contextual behavioral ads, whatever that might be, essentially that means they're tracking you across a bunch of different apps and websites learning about your behavior only to advertise better to you. I would switch to this to opt out and hit save preferences to opt out of this.
Again, you might want to go through any apps that you use regularly that are advertising-based apps and make sure all of the advertising is set to as restrictive as possible. I hope this helps. If it did, really the best way that you can say thank you is hitting the subscribe button down below. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys.