Transcript of iPhone Mistakes That RUIN Your Privacy

- iPhones are synonymous with privacy, or at least that's what Apple's marketing team wants us to believe. But guess what? Real privacy doesn't come from a device and it's rarely on by default. It requires you and I to take action, and these are the mistakes I see most iPhone users make and step-by-step instructions on how to fix it. By default, the photos and documents and data that we upload to Apple servers can be seen by Apple. Advanced Data Protection is just a fancy name for end-to-end encryption, which means that you control your encryption keys and even Apple can't access or view the data that you store in the iCloud. If it sounds unfamiliar, chances are you've never turned it on before. To check if you've enabled advanced data protection or to turn it on for the very first time, open your settings app, click on your Apple ID there on the top, you are gonna find iCloud and then scroll all the way down to find advanced data protection. Now turning this on won't change your experience using your phone or slow it down in any way, but you will see that Apple requires you to have updated devices. All of your devices need to be updated, an account with two factor authentication set up and at least one account recovery contact or recovery key. The good news is that once you set it up, you never have to think about it again. Your data is encrypted, you're good to go. Speaking of securing your account with two-factor authentication, the default security method most people rely on is the six digit code sent to another Apple device. While this isn't a huge risk per se, it's a mistake not to be using 2FA keys for your overall account security. And if you already have these keys like I recommend, you might as well set them up with your Apple account to check on your setup. Open your settings app and click on your name again at the top, and now you're looking for sign in and security, which usually takes a second to load, and then you'll see two factor authentication. You can pair up to six different physical 2FA keys on a single account, and adding a new one is as simple as clicking add security key. If you're still not sure how to do this, don't worry. I have an entire walkthrough video that you can watch next. Most iPhone users I know make the mistake of keeping every single photo they take in their recents album. Sure, they might create separate albums or mark a photo to put in their favorites, but for the most part, the recent album is kinda this catch-all for all of the photos. But did you know that Apple gives you a hidden album that is locked with your biometrics? Let's say you take a picture of a sensitive document or something with your personal health data or even some photos that you just don't wanna show up. If someone's scrolling through your photos app to hide those images, simply click on the three dots on the upper right corner and click hide. You'll see the photos suddenly disappear. But if you go back to your albums and you're gonna scroll down, you're gonna look under utilities, you're gonna find your hidden folder with a lock right next to it. Opening this folder requires biometrics like face id, which you should already have set up, so now you can safely keep certain photos away from prying eyes to unhide photo, you do pretty much the same thing. You click on the three dots up here on the right and now click unhide. That's it. I think it's absolutely crazy how much we allow our devices to interrupt us throughout the day. Actually, you know, it's not that we allow it, we, we actually seem to encourage it. This is so bad that a study by the National Institute of Health found that 60% of young adults experience phantom vibrations throughout the day. That's where you think that your phone just buzzed with a message, but sometimes your phone isn't even in your pocket. While I have my own opinions about how detrimental this is to our psychological health, I also think that it's a big mistake from a privacy standpoint. See, there are problems with notifications, not just because they can sometimes share too much information on the lock screen, but also because they use a separate service known as Apple Push notification or a PN to deliver these notifications to the phone in early 2024. This process was exploited by apps like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram to fingerprint user devices. Personally, I've decided to turn off almost all notifications except for those that allow my wife to get ahold of me. Other than that, everybody else can wait to make these kinds of changes. Go into your settings app. Scroll down just a bit to find notifications. From here, I suggest you make sure show previews is set to when unlocked, screen sharing is set to notifications off, and then go through all the apps that don't absolutely need to send you notifications and turn them all off. Thanks to Gmail giving us this option to archive an email instead of deleting it. We've been conditioned over the past couple decades to think that we absolutely must keep every message ever sent to us just in case we need to search for it again in the future. This is another mistake I see made so often and it usually has nothing to do with the text. It's all about the photos and videos being sent. Check this out When you go into the settings app and scroll a ways down to find messages, you can scroll down on this screen to find your message history. The default for most people here is going to be forever. I know this is gonna be hard for so many people to do, but changing this to at least one year is not going to kill you, and it's so much better from a privacy and a data storage perspective. Or you can be a hero and choose 30 days. It's entirely up to you. Just make sure you download the photos that you want to keep before you do this. It's always good to keep a back of your iPhone that you update every so often. You can do this on your Mac, on your iCloud account, on a separate drive or if you'd like on an end-to-end encrypted service like Internxt. My internet app allows me to store individual photos, files, and of course a backup of my iPhone and a secure way that is not under the control of Apple, which is important to me. Best of all, as sponsor of this video, they're offering a pretty cool lifetime deal that basically replaces this physical hard drive with an online version at a cheaper price. No monthly subscription, just a fully encrypted online vault that you can access anywhere, anytime. Get an amazing 80% off any lifetime plan. And this deal is so exclusive that it only works when you use the link you see here or in the description and then use the code ATS An iPhone out of the box is programmed to send Apple all the diagnostics and usage data that it wants. They want to improve the device, obviously the iCloud products and Siri, and that all makes sense, but check this out. They even wanna understand the size and shape of buildings around you. Seriously, it's a mistake not to change this. There are more than enough people who send their data Apple can do without yours and mine. You can stop this by going into your settings app, clicking privacy and security, and then scrolling all the way to the bottom to find analytics and improvements. I personally toggle all of these off and really there's no harm for you to do the same. Most people like to jump into their GPS settings and turn them all off thinking that this is the only way that apps can really track you. Now, while that's a good idea, the mistake is forgetting about the power of Bluetooth apps can use Bluetooth data to track where you are in a store or the general location that has nothing to do with GPS. And what's interesting to me is that when you go into your settings app into the privacy and security and then scroll down here to Bluetooth, it's often confusing to understand why certain apps need access to Bluetooth in the first place. I mean, some imaging apps like DJI or Insta360 need to connect to their respective devices, but ESPN? Does LinkedIn or Hulu really need access to Bluetooth? I say no, and for this reason, I toggle them off. Even with hotel apps that use Bluetooth as a key card, I only turn it on when I'm going to stay at the hotel. They don't need to get carte blanche on my device at all times. We humans are simple beings who love things to be easy and memorable. I get it. When we have to come up with a four digit or a six digit passcode, we tend to use the same exact one all the time, and unfortunately, password managers can't autofill here and help us. This means that the same code that unlocks your phone might also be the code that unlocks other apps or might even be used as the pin code for your debit card. This is a huge no-no. If somebody can peek over your shoulder to see you type in a passcode that you use everywhere you're in big trouble, it's best to have one code to unlock your phone and then a separate one that you use for other apps that require it, whether that's a secure email app, your two FA key pin, or your bank card. It is a mistake to share a photo with all of the metadata still attached, which usually includes things like the exact GPS coordinates. I just published another video on the privacy implications of photos on your mobile phone, but one of the big - Takeaways that you need to either change the way you take photos or change the way that you share them. In other words, you can either go into location services for the camera app in your settings app and restrict access to GPS data altogether, or after you take a photo and when you're preparing to share it, click on options here on the top and toggle off the location data and make sure it's removed before you post or share it. You know, this particular risk tends to get overinflated, but I still think it's worth a mention here. I'm very careful about which public wifi networks I connect my phone to. For the most part, I tend to only connect to trusted networks at my home or office, and then I tether to my cellular network anywhere else, the coffee shop, the airport, places like that. But when, for various reasons, I feel like I really need to connect to a public network, whether that's at a hotel or especially when I'm traveling internationally, I turn on A VPN while it's possible to set up your own VPN, and I've detailed that in another video, the most popular way to do this is through a commercial VPN service. You simply download their app, you find a server and you click connect. It's that easy. It's not a foolproof security measure, but it's a lot better than the risks of connecting to a public wifi network. Not all apps respect your privacy even when they say they do. It's a mistake to just assume that an app is trustworthy, even if you found it on the app store or heard about it from a friend. It's a big ask to think that anybody's going to review an app's privacy policy before downloading it. I don't even have the time to do that, but at the very least, you can restrict any and all notifications location data, Bluetooth data and more. And if you're like me, you can go through your phone every couple months or so and just delete the apps that you haven't opened in a while. You can always download them again if you need them. So which of these turned out to be a new and important change for you? Leave a comment below to let me know and be sure to visit this link for Internxt here using the code ATS to get 80% off their lifetime encrypted data plans.