Is Your Smart Phone Spying on You?

Is your smart phone spying on you? In short, yes. Follow the simple guide below to find out how to protect yourself.

Apple

Frequent Locations

iPhones track your location data down to the minute.

Who uses this information:

• Third party advertisement: If you visit a shoe store, you might receive shoe advertisements.
• Apps: Apps may request permission to access your frequent locations. This may be useful for some things such as viewing local weather or calculating ETAs from your location.

How to stop it:

• Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Frequent Locations
• There is a toggle for turning on and off frequent Locations and Improve Maps

Identifier for Advertising (IDFA)

This allows developers and marketers to track your activity. They use this data for targeted advertising on apps and web pages.

How to stop it:

• General > About > Advertising
• There is a toggle to turn on Limit Ad Tracking

Microsoft

Windows 10

The new updated Windows 10 tracks just about everything you do.

Here is a section of the Windows 10 terms:

Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to: 1.comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies; 2.protect our customers, for example to prevent spam or attempts to defraud users of the services, or to help prevent the loss of life or serious injury of anyone; 3.operate and maintain the security of our services, including to prevent or stop an attack on our computer systems or networks; or 4.protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services – however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement.

How to stop it:

Many methods are available, with varying effectiveness:

• InPrivate Mode – Setting you browser to InPrivate mode does not completely cover your tracks
• Unchecking all tracking pages upon opening – This has been tested (even with a DisableWinTracking tool) and found it still tracked some information.

Google/Android

Voice Commands

Every voice command you make on your android phone is logged.  These recordings should only be available to you but the idea of possibly having any personal information stored may be unnerving to some. Every Google device records and stores voice commands.

How to stop it:

• Settings > Account > Google > Sign In > Personal Info & privacy > Activity Controls > Voice & Audio Activity
• There is a toggle to turn this off. You can also delete all saved recordings.

Location Tracking

Just Like Apple, Android tracks your location. Google doesn’t limit their tracking to cell phones. They continue tracking you from your desktop computer, if you leave your Google account logged in.

Who uses this information:

• Third party advertisement: If you visit a shoe store, you might receive shoe advertisements.
• Apps: Apps may request permission to access your frequent locations. This may be useful for some things such as viewing local weather or calculating ETAs from your location.

How to stop it:

• Settings > Account > Google > Sign In > Personal Info & privacy >Google Location History
• The you can toggle this off and you can delete location history

Android Advertising ID

Similar to Apple’s Identifier for Advertising, Google takes information from your search activity to use for targeted advertising. You see these within apps downloaded from Google Play.

How to stop it:

• Settings > Account > Google > Sign In > Personal Info & privacy > Ads Services
• This will take you to a web page to manage the ad settings. Then you can toggle it off.
• You can also reset the ID which clears past data. This can be helpful if you still want to see ads tailored to you but not about something you recently searched about. You can even delete and add interests to better tailor the ads.

This will not stop the ads but will stop the targeted ads based on your search history.