Much recently it came to the attention of the general audience that there is a large number of their iPhone apps were collecting and upload information about their usage at any time of the day now may it be while they are asleep. There even is an article in The Washington Post that has been published dedicatedly towards this topic. Most certainly data is a huge commodity at present.
Practically almost everyone is using some type of computing devices now may it be a laptop, phone or some other kind of device the users are paying for their apps by contributing marketing and other information to entities that supple them. Though if you are a security expert of a high profiled hacker with access to high tech blocking tools those are who can secure their info to be supplied via these iPhone apps.
Since the article has been published and the details have been verified there have been numerous expert voices from mobile app developers that invested their knowledge to create an app for iPhone. Many of them came forth to project the reality to iPhone users that they are not wholly protected from this matter even though Apple consistently been assuring its customers that it is taking care of their privacy which isn’t entirely true.
Though these mobile app professionals and app security experts who have invested their years of experience to create an app for iPhone have confessed to the risk factors that are there they also elaborated on few simple steps that can be implied in order to minimize the amount of tracking that majority of app vendor’s access. Below are the few simple steps if applied will surely be of aid to iPhone users.
1st Precaution: Turn On the “Limited Ad Tracking”
Even by applying this the user will not be entirely able to get rid of these ads but it would help in a manner to supply the advertiser with the least amount of info that possible would be obtained. Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) places a kibosh in the practice which is known as the “Interest-Based Ads”. Interest-Based Ads are just a fancy term given to ads that target you on the bases of the user’s search history and usage stats. Turning it off would mean that the user would be acquainted with ads that are completely useless to them though it will be related to the marketer’s aspects.
How to turn on- Limited Ad Tracking:
- Go in Setting
- Select “Privacy”
- Scroll below to the bottom of the setting screen on “Advertisement”
- Lastly, opt to select the turn-on “Limited Ad Tracking”
Certainly, the LAT feature/ option is not extremely reliable or perfect but it does provide better protection. Marketers also make use of a system that is called “Fingerprinting” which is capable of trace information regarding the device model, type and other specific data that is public on the user’s browser. Though over time it has been experienced that marketers do not consider fingerprinting to be of much use to them in comparison to ad tracking while it does offer quite a lot of information. Apple is consistently operating to lock down some of this info though most of it yet is accessible.
If a user is interested to test how effective LAT is to protect their iPhone in regards to it the user can try taking the Panopticlick test which is provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since it will assist in monitoring the devices fingerprinting including others as well. A user can run it on their Apple iPhone XS after turning on the LAT feature that will help them to provide a “Partial Protection” result.
2nd Precaution: Lockdown Safari
If a user is using the Safari browser quite often on their iPhone there are various and a number of things that can be done to make the experience more secure.
These are the steps that can be taken to attain a securer experience:
- Go in “Settings”
- Select/ Tap on “Safari”
- Scroll below and select the “Privacy & Security”
- Turn on “Block all Cookies”
(Cookies on numerous websites can contain/ access a large amount of info on what a user uses on the site for example by blocking cookies the user can prevent data from getting collected)
- Turn on “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking”
(This would mean advertisers and third-party contents providers won’t be able to trace the users from one site to another)
Whereas the user will probably yet feel things to be inconvenient for them. By applying actions the visits to sites of the user would no longer be recorded for example the user is will no longer be able to revisit a playlist or repurchase the same purchase that was made during the previous year. At times even the sites will refuse entry till you won’t allow them to collect cookies which will be entirely the user’s choice since till previous will not be given the webpage won’t be accessible.