How to stop your iPhone from tracking your location

The New York Times published a story on Thursday about how many companies can track your location data and even identify people when that information is supposed to be anonymous.

Apple’s latest iPhone software, iOS 13, helps protect you like never before and lets you know which apps are tracking your location and when. But your iPhone still tracks everywhere you go, usually by default.

For example, there’s a System Services page in iOS that shows 20 different ways iPhone tracks your location. It does so for many good reasons, but most people probably don’t know the site even exists.

Your iPhone uses your location for HomeKit to determine if you’re away or close to home – one way it could automatically turn on the lights when you get home or turn them off when you leave, for example. There’s also a setting to set the time zone automatically based on your location, or to make sure it’s searching for the right mobile networks. Another setting can be enabled to share your location with others, such as in the “Find My” app.

But there are some places where you might not want your iPhone to track you. For example, Apple tracks your location for “Location-Based Apple Ads”. It can use your location for “Location-Based Notifications,” or to tell you about merchants you’ve used Apple Pay to buy something from.

More importantly, there’s an entire section called “Key Locations,” where Apple stores places you frequent — like work, home, or wherever you’ve been. Apple also uses this information for some legitimate purposes, such as improving “Photo Memory” so it can send you summaries of the photos you’ve taken in certain places. It can also improve your results in Maps, Calendar, and other apps. It’s all “encrypted end-to-end,” which means the information is scrambled on your phone and “unreadable by Apple,” according to the settings page.

But most of my colleagues who see this for the first time don’t like it, even if Apple keeps location data private, largely because they don’t know the area exists. . So let’s change that.

Here’s how to see how iPhone tracks your location and how to manage what it tracks.

• Open Settings on your iPhone.
• Tap “Privacy”.
• Select “Location Services”.
• Scroll to the bottom and select “System Services”.

You will see a page that looks like this:

The purple hollow arrow means Apple can get your location “under certain conditions.” So for HomeKit, having that arrow on my phone will only access my location if I’m using HomeKit to control my location-based smart home and if the app needs to know when I’m home or not. The regular purple arrow shows that a system service has recently used your location, and the gray arrow shows that the service has recorded your location in the last 24 hours.

Turning off some of these features may cause problems with your phone. For example, you may need your location information to properly search for cellular networks and to properly configure the compass so that Apple Maps knows which direction you’re facing. However, you can also safely turn off “Location-Based Apple Ads” or things like “Popular Near Me”, “iPhone Analytics” and “Share My Location” if you never Now share your location with friends and family.

Now, open “Critical Locations”.

This will show you a list of multiple places where your iPhone has recorded your location, again possibly just to improve some of your experience. And again, Apple says it doesn’t share this with anyone. However, you might be surprised to find that it tracks the majority of places you go.

My iPhone knows I was in Seattle in October, Miami in November, and many other places. When I visit, it has a record of exactly where I’ve been in each city, right down to the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a restaurant I stopped at in Bristol, Rhode Island, this month.

Again, Apple says all of this is stored securely on your device and not seen by Apple or other companies. It’s also protected behind Face ID or Touch ID, so others can’t just grab your iPhone and see where you’ve been.

But you should know that your iPhone knows where you’re going and you can turn it off if this makes you uncomfortable. To disable this feature, go back to the top of the Important Locations page and toggle the button to off.

Finally, you should also just double-check that you know how apps are using your location. To do this:

• Open settings.
• Open privacy.
• Select Location Services.
• Scroll down the page.

You’ll see a list of apps that have access to your location. Tap each info to choose whether you never want them to use your location, while you’re using it, or all the time. In general, you want apps to only use your location when you’re using them, because a lot of apps need to know your location. For example, a retail app might want to show you the nearest store, or a ride-hailing app needs to know where to pick you up. The decision is yours.