How to stop your phone from giving up your location
LOCK DOWN THE APPS AND SETTINGS THAT COULD BE LEAKING YOUR LOCATION DATA.
YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD by now that your mobile phone can and has been used by many companies to track your location and potentially every movement you make. But have you done anything about it yet? If not, then this month’s column is for you.
There are lots of ways your phone can be used to track your location. The most obvious is apps that use the phone’s GPS and send that data back to the app provider. Sometimes, that information is essential to the operation of an app — for example in Google Maps — but often... it’s not necessary at all.
But there are other ways your phone is giving up your location as well. On Android and iOS, for example, unless you specifically turn it off, your phone will keep a log of every location you visit, and will regularly upload location and Wi-Fi data to Google or Apple’s servers. Photos you take will often have geotagging information included — which will be preserved if you, say, upload the photos to Facebook or Twitter, allowing other people to know exactly where the photos were taken. So let’s take a look at a few simple things you can do to stop your location data getting out.
TURN OFF LOCATION TRACKING ON AN APPLE DEVICE
On iOS devices, you can head to ‘Settings > Privacy’ to find Location Services. It’s here that you’ll do most of your adjustments. Now, for most people, just switching the whole thing off is not an option — Maps is just too useful a feature to disable completely. We do strongly recommend that you read the ‘About Location Services & Privacy’ document linked from that page, however. It tells you just what information Apple gathers from you, including information that it uploads to Apple’s servers.
If turning off Location Services completely is not an option for you, however, then you should go through the apps one by one and decide whether that app needs to know your location. Every app which has permission to access your GPS is listed here, and you can go through one by one and change the setting for those apps to ‘While Using’ (which means that it can only access GPS while the app is open) or ‘Never,’ which disables GPS for those apps.
As a special note, we recommend disabling GPS for both your browser and Camera app. Disabling for the browser automatically denies any website that asks for your location data. Websites like Google can still do some location-based stuff based on your IP address (so they will still probably know what city you’re in), but it won’t give up your specific location. Disabling for the Camera will stop the camera app from geotagging your photos, which we’ll get into more in a little bit.
Finally, there’s a special section called System Services in the App list. Tap on it, and it will bring up all the different ways your phone OS itself gathers your location data.
You can switch all or some of these off as you like. This will stop a lot of the location information sent back to Apple. It will stop Apple from sending you location-based alerts and ads,
will stop it from sending back anonymous data on local Wi-Fi and cellular networks and stop your phone from automatically sharing your location with friends and family.
There are some things you might want to leave on. If you switch off Find My iPhone, for example, you won’t be able to use that feature if you lose your phone. SOS, Time Zone and Compass Calibration are also tools that you might want to leave on.
ON AN ANDROID DEVICE
When it comes to devices running Google operating systems, you can actually switch off location settings in several places.
The first, and easiest, is to turn off location tracking account-wide on your Google account. Open a browser on any device and follow these steps: Go to myaccount.google.com/activity
controls and log into Google (if you’re not already). Scroll down to find Location History and turn the switch to off (paused). Google will give you a warning; just click through it. This will turn off Google’s location tracking on all your devices attached to this Google account. That is, your device will no longer upload location information to Google.
Now to delete your existing records. Go to www.google.com/maps/timeline This shows the complete history of your movements, as recorded by Google. Down the bottom right of the map, you’ll see a bin button. Click on it. You’ll get a prompt asking for confirmation that you want to delete your location history. Check the box and click ‘Delete location history’.
Now we’ve stopped Google from tracking your location. But what about other apps? For those, you’ll have to go to your phone or tablet, much like on iOS above.
On the Android home page, tap on Settings. Tap on Apps or Application Manager. (On Samsung TouchWiz, this might be in the Applications tab). This will show you all your apps, and tapping on one will show its permissions.
We actually want to view this list not by app, but by permission, however. Tap on the settings gear button or the vertical ellipses on the top right, and select App Permissions. This will bring up a list of the different types of app permissions on the Android device.
Choose Location. You’ll now see a list of apps with permission to access your location information. You can now individually disable location tracking for those apps that you want to deny access to.
Much as with iOS, we recommend turning off location on your Camera and browsers at least. This will stop website location tracking as well as geotagging on photos.
Once you’ve done that, your Android device should be much less open about who it shares your location with!