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I’ve got a quick question for you today. Do you feel that with today’s online world
that your privacy is somehow being compromised? Duh! Is my privacy being compromised? The
question is how do I limit how much my privacy is compromised? Today, we are going to talk
to iPhone users whose privacy, I have to tell you, is not number one on the list of priorities
at Apple. Oh no, isn’t that a fact? It seems that Apple is bound and determined to undermine
any efforts that we make to ensure our own privacy. What am I talking about today? Well,
have a look at today’s video: Get the Heck Out of My Kitchen, Apple!
There can be no doubt that smartphones are amazing tools that give us some tremendous
capabilities if we enable all of the different features. But one of the features that are
built into our smartphone deals with knowing where we are in physical space, location services.
Location services can create all sorts of nightmares as far as privacy is concerned.
By the way all of you Android and other phone users, don’t be smirking at the poor Apple
folk thinking my operating system is so much better than Apple’s as far as privacy. They
all suck. They all suck big time as far as privacy is concerned but Apple, they’ve
got some special things happening within the Apple world.
Now what I want to talk to you today about is dealing with location services and making
sure that they’re not tracking you when you don’t want it to because if you don’t
go and dive deep into the bowels into your iPhone and turn off some settings, Apple can
actually track and generate a profile of almost everything you do, where you are, what you’re
doing, what time it is. They can collect it all and I don’t know about you but it makes
me rather uncomfortable. And it’s not right there in the service. Here’s the thing that
bugs me. These settings shouldn’t be multiple levels deep within the iPhone. No, they should
be right on the surface. Let me go back. Where we’re going to go is we’re going
to go into our Settings, we’re going to go into our Privacy Settings, we’re going
to go into Location Services and if you’ve had your iPhone for any length of time whatsoever,
you’ve got tons of these location services that are turned on or off. Most people just
go through these and they decide what they want to have turned on. For example, you want
to have Safari knowing where you are. You want the reminders to know where you are because
you often create notes based on location. But if you go down to the very bottom, this
is the spot that I wanted to talk to you about – System Services. These services, if you
don’t go in and modify them, Apple can basically create a profile which tells them everything
about you, far too much information. The first thing that you look at is see this little
legend here, this tells you that when you go into the next screen what services have
been accessed in the last period of time. Purple ones mean just in the last little while,
a grey icon says that it’s been within the last 24 hours, etc. So you want to read those
and take a look because here are the different services that they have turned on within our
iPhone. The ones that we want to turn off right away
is first of all Diagnostics & Usage because if we leave Diagnostics and Usage on, our
iPhone anonymously sends Apple information about everything that we do, literally everything.
Now they say it’s anonymous so theoretically it doesn’t know that I’m Steve Dotto but
it knows that this phone is doing those things and it’s basically creating a diary of every
activity that you make. They say that they do this so that they can improve iOS and they
can improve customer services. What a load of—I’m not going to say it because they
might actually use it to improve customer service at times but let’s face it what
they’re improving is their ability to sell to us at the end of the day. That’s really
what Apple is interested in improving. So without hesitation, off with Diagnostics & Usage.
Location-based ads, how in the world did that get buried 15 levels deep—okay, I exaggerated—three
or four levels deep in the iPhone? Turn off these so that you’re not getting all those
irritating little banners being sent to you. Right away, just in a few seconds, I found
two settings that I don’t want to have turned on. Not only are they invading my privacy
and sending content to me that I probably don’t really want to have, but they’re
also using up my battery, they’re also using up my services and they’re also using up
my data plan. I don’t want any of those things to be happening.
And while we’re at it, what is this Frequent Locations thing? It’s turned on. What does
it do? It allows my iPhone to learn places I frequently visit in order to provide useful
location-related information. If I frequently visit a location, chances are I’m doing
it for a reason and I already know what’s going on at said location. Off! There we go.
We have taken the first step towards recapturing some of our privacy. I’m feeling a little
more transparent as we speak. Okay, let’s go back up. Let’s go back
into the Privacy Settings one more time and take a look at this one here which seems to
slide by people quite a bit. Go to Privacy, look there. Why is it always at the bottom?
They hide it down there. Limit Ad Tracking, what’s this all about? You turn this on
and off and look, nothing happens. They don’t give you any explanation. You actually have
to dive in here to learn more in order to find out more and Apple, they are such good
writers. They’ve got a whole legal team that writes these things. They are excellent
at the use of verbiage but essentially I will paraphrase for you.
Ad Tracking allows advertising networks to understand who you are, a little bit about
your age, your demographic, same sort of stuff or information say you’re getting Facebook.
When you’re on Facebook, they look at your profile, they look at what you’re posting
about and then they customize the ads that are delivered to you to more fit your profile.
Fine. I don’t necessarily hate that concept. Heck, I do some advertising online myself
so I’d be speaking out of two sides of my face if I said that this was all bad.
What I don’t like about this is the fact that this is a tool that you have to turn
on in order to protect your privacy when everything else you have to turn off in order to protect
your privacy. Think about what we just looked at. They had all tools turned on that were
tracking us so we had to go in and disable them. Now Apple flips the metaphor completely
on us and we have to turn this on as opposed to turning it off. So they’re just muddying
the waters and confusing us by doing it this way. But that’s me. That’s just my attitude
towards it. I think we should have a standard convention. Apple is after all about standardizing
interface but here they’ve broken their own rule.
Having said that, if you turn on Limit Ad Tracking, you’ll probably receive the same
amount of ads delivered to you in different services, in different apps that you use.
They just won’t know quite as much about you as they do now so it won’t be quite
as targeted. You’ll be getting more general ads. Now the benefit is – I don’t know
if there’s a real benefit to you because they basically told us we’re going to get
the same number of ads. It’s just whether or not you want to protect your privacy a
little bit more and not have ads delivered to you that are custom-tailored to you. That’s
going to be a personal choice that you make but again the reason I’m showing you this
is it kind of cheeses me off a little bit that Apple hid it down there and that they
then changed the metaphor. Those are two areas that we’ve looked into where we can protect
our privacy a little bit more. What’s next, Steve? Have I whetted your
appetite? The last area that I want to talk to you about today is well, I don’t know
if I need to wear a tinfoil on my head to be as concerned about this but these are the
apps that give you access to your microphone for. These are apps that can gain access,
to listen in to your microphone so I would take a look at this list of apps that have
been enabled and make sure that you haven’t installed something that’s kind of flakey,
something a little bit more of concern. I’m taking a look at these apps. Instagram,
I don’t really do voice over on Instagram so I can disable that. I think I’ll do that
right now. I’ll disable that. Human to Cat translator, that’s just a fun thing that
makes meow like a cat. Sorry. Evernote, I definitely need the microphone for; Google,
for the voice stuff. Google Map, Translate which is something, simpleClap which I don’t
need to use that in it either, and Songify which is a fun game that I play. Those are
the apps that have access to my microphone, just something worth sharing.
Protecting your privacy has become something that we have to become experts on. It’s
extra bandwidth that we have consume as far as knowledge which is kind of unfair, to a
certain extent, that the mobility carriers, that all these high-tech companies are taking
advantage of their systems in order to invade our privacy this way and forcing us to spend
time to learn and to basically protect something that used to taken for granted. We can complain
about it till the cows come home but the bottom line is that it’s not going to change and
it’s only going to get worse. So the farther behind you are when you start paying attention
to privacy issues, the more catch-up you’re going to have to do. So if you watched this
video to this point here, well you’re well on the path. It means that you’re concerned,
you’re paying attention, you’re starting to take control and you’re asking the questions
and educating yourself. So do us all a favor. Educate your friends
a little bit about it. One great way is share this video. Let them know about this video,
any iPhone friends that you have and tell them hey, take a look at this and make sure
that you turn off these things on your iPhone and pay attention it. Oh look, there’s Farley
on my screen saying, “Don’t forget to protect your privacy.”
That’s all the time that I have today. I hope that this video has been tremendously
useful for you. If it has, please don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and if
you are so inclined, we would love you to become one of our Patreon supporters. These
videos are supported by the community and that is you. I’m Steve Dotto. Have fun storming
the castle!