When using a mobile phone, you should pay close attention to one detail: some applications can spy on our activities.
Phone in hand
In recent years, we have seen how increasingly important the smartphone has become in everyone’s life. Especially during the difficult period of the pandemic, mobile phones have proven to be indispensable for staying in touch with friends, partners, family, work colleagues and for continuing to manage one’s life despite the necessary isolation. Even those less accustomed to technological innovations, including the elderly, have learned to use the smartphone , recognizing its role as a great resource, especially in difficult situations. However, as most experts well know, knowing how to use the phone also means learning to recognize all the potential risks , especially in terms of data protection and privacy.
Apps can spy on you: Pay attention to the details on your phone
In fact, smartphones allow you to access the internet, a place where fraud and deception attempts are always around the corner. Perhaps not everyone knows that many of the apps we tend to download and install on our devices without much hassle can actually be very dangerous.
Spying apps
Some of these applications actually manage to spy on users, monitoring all activities and therefore carrying out much more extensive monitoring than “classic” monitoring.
This is a real problem.
In this way, applications can have carte blanche to observe everything we do and then use this data for invasive advertising or worse, for hacking attempts.
So, how do you know if an app or website is spying on you? The first thing to do is grab your phone and go to the Settings menu.
If the phone in question is an iPhone, simply go to Privacy & Security and finally to Tracking to see a page with all the apps installed on the device.
On this page, you can choose which apps can track your movements and which ones you want to block. If you allow an app to track you, you’re allowing it to use your information for advertising purposes or share it with data brokers.
If we don’t like all of this, we can simply disable tracking for all apps.
Beware of apps, they can spy on your activities: do this and you will have no problems
If we want to have a detailed report on all the apps that track us, just go to Privacy and Security.
Then click on App Privacy Report . By enabling this item, we will receive an accurate report on all the apps and sites that spy on us.
Phone
Can this operation we just described also be performed with Android phones? The answer is obviously yes. In this case too, you must click on Settings and then on Application Management .
Click Manage Permissions to see all the apps and sites that have access to your phone’s camera , allowed apps, and more.
Here too, as we have already seen with the iPhone, we can choose to allow certain applications to continue tracking us or to refuse their consent to all.