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You may be surprised to learn how many apps are actually relying on your phone’s location services to provide the best service possible to you — at a cost, of course. It may make you uncomfortable to think about your phone being able to track your every movement, even if the purpose is to bring you an updated weather report or connect you with a person nearby who might turn out to be the coffee date of your dreams.
You can take control of the situation — you need to turn off this location setting right now, according to security experts.
Unless you have a good idea of which specific apps are using location, go into settings and disable your phone’s ability to just turn on location whenever it pleases.
Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.
According to Mashable: “On this screen, you'll find a list of apps that either have requested or have access to your location data. Unless it's for a service that actually needs to know where you are, like a maps app, you should individually switch every individual app setting to ‘Never.’”
If you are attempting to give apps like Google Maps or Lyft access to your location, change the setting to “While Using the App." This shift will ensure that those apps aren’t tracking location at all times, which can be downright creepy.
One app that many of us forget about when it comes to location services: our phone’s camera. Ever wonder why your photo can automatically place photos in certain cities or at specific landmarks? The camera’s geotagging capabilities may be convenient at times, but if you’d rather disable this feature, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Camera > Never.
