Photo remixed from an original by Yurchyks/Shutterstock.
Your
smartphone tracks your location for all sorts of useful things—driving
navigation, updating the weather forecast, and even live traffic
updates. However, if you'd rather not have Google and Apple tracking
that information—not to mention having it available on your phone for
thieves to find—here's how you can turn off location tracking.
Location
tracking actually provides lots of useful things to us, but while Google
and Apple collect all that data anonymously, it's still stored on your
phone (and in Apple's case, your computer). Anyone with the right tools
could easily find out where you've been with your phone over a
significant period of time, so if you're worried about this, you may
want to turn this features off. Here's how.
Disable Location Caching on Android
Luckily,
Android's location tracking is actually an opt-in feature. You may or
may not have enabled it when you first set up your phone. To find out,
head to Settings > Location and Security, and uncheck "Use Wireless
Networks". This will make applications like Maps a bit slower to grab
your current location, and it won't be quite as accurate, but Google
won't be collecting any location data, nor will it be stored on your
phone thereafter.
However, if you want to clear the previously cached locations from your phone, you'll need to rooted your device. Then after installing the free Location Cache
app, you can view a map of your tracked locations on it, as well as
clear them from your phone and disable the cache with one tap.
Disable Location Tracking on iOS
In
iOS, the situation is a bit more complicated. Turning off location
services will stop sending data back to Apple, but it will still cache
your location on your phone, so anyone with access to your computer or
your phone can see where you've been (since iOS syncs all that
information back to iTunes).
No comments:
Post a Comment