Your Smartphone Privacy Settings & Tricks.
Smartphone privacy In today’s tech world, everyone uses their phone to do their daily activities and only few knows that everything done online can be monitored and tracked. How probably could our smartphones be spying on us and how can we stop it?
Currently most users prefer high quality digital services especially those that are free and they don’t typically realize that when an online service is free, the way to pay for the service is allowing access to your data.
Some data is collected through the app permissions requested by the app in order to enable some features. These permissions may be camera access, phone contacts, GPS, microphone and many more.
Today we have highlighted some possible ways how your smart phone may spy on you.
Your Phone’s Camera
Camera is mostly used by you to take photos and even record videos, in such process most malicious apps take this advantage to steal your photos.
Also hackers can gain access to your smartphone’s camera and use it in in any way.
So you need to be careful when using your phone’s camera especially when using camera apps and other apps that require camera access.
GPS & Location Services.
Clearly know that by downloading a location monitoring app means gathering information such as GPS location, managing time spent on digital and social media, applying a content filter to search engines.
Granting permission to activate an app means that the app can make use of this access at any time without informing you. Some attacker can use your phone’s GPS to track you at any time.
It’s advisable that you always turn off your phone’s GPS setting when not used.
Spy Apps
Currently some apps may be developed by Hackers who are specifically targeting you and will try to gain access to your camera, microphone or your data by sending you emails or texts with a malicious link or file that will grant them access if you click on it.
When you are unfortunate and download an app that was designed to steal your data, it can sell it to third parties.
Advice: always be careful on apps you download and apps that are installed on your device as someone can gain access to your device and install it. Also always scan your apps with antivirus to detect suspicious apps.
Your Phone’s IP Address
IP address is a number that identifies you when you’re online. It is needed to send and receive data when performing online activity such as accessing websites and apps.
IP address usually exposes your geographic location, usually your city and so on. Some platforms, internet service providers, government agencies can restrict you, block you to some online services. For example Ugandan government blocked some social platforms access, and that is done by blocking IP addresses.
Advice: Always use VPN apps or software to access restricted sites and apps since it will assign another IP address from different country to your device to access online contents.
Your Phone’s Microphone
In simple terms your phone listens to you in many ways such as audio recording apps, voice search, and other forms of speech recognition.
If you download an app and grant it access to your microphone of which we do it in our daily life, it can switch it on and listen. So through this process your voice may be going somewhere that you don’t know.
Browse Cookies
In simple terms this is the information used by the websites to understand user browsing activities, interests, habits and many more so that the browser can deliver better web results.
Although cookies has many advantages for your online experience, security and privacy is another concern for users regarding cookies.
Whenever you browse the internet on the cookie enabled sites, it will be recording all your online activities and most users are unaware that such information is stored somewhere on the computer hence this information can be accessed by any third parties including businesses & government agencies.
Always clear browser history and cookies for your privacy reasons.
Conclusion: You should always take care of your privacy by always monitoring which apps are installed on your device, scan your device with antivirus apps, remember to always clear your browsing history and cookies, where necessary use VPN services.
Also read how to watch live tv on your smartphone for free in Uganda
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