Protect Your Privacy

Quick Win

Fiddle with your devices’ settings to stop them from tracking your every move.

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• Location, location, location. Don’t want your phone to tell tech companies where you are? Go through your apps’ settings one by one, adjusting or turning off location permissions for each. You can also turn off location entirely, but that will prevent you from using GPS-based apps like Google Maps.
• Check your AI voice assistant’s privacy settings. Google and Apple have ended their practice of having real people listen to your recordings, at least for now. Amazon allows users of Echo, its virtual assistant, to delete its voice recordings by turning on the setting and saying, “Alexa, delete what I just said.” You can also opt out of having Alexa send voice recordings to Amazon. You can delete Siri data on Apple devices as well.
• Hide your trail. Tracking cookies are found in most websites, but you can adjust your browser settings to disable them so they don’t follow you everywhere you surf. How to manage cookies will vary from browser to browser, but look for available privacy settings and turn off third-party cookies. Apps such as CCleaner and Advanced SystemCare can automate this process.

Why

Ever get the feeling someone’s watching you? If you spend time online or use an AI voice assistant, your answer is likely yes. In a survey of 113 Amazon Alexa users, 91 percent reported at least one instance of the device recording them unintentionally, and 53 percent reported that some of these recordings didn’t contain a voice command to prompt their device. A majority of participants didn’t know that their voice commands were being stored, that other people could potentially access those recordings or how to delete their data. The work was presented in 2019 at the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security in Canterbury, United Kingdom. If thinking about your online privacy makes you anxious (and it probably should), you have options to protect it.