Essential iOS 14 Privacy Features You Need to Know Joseph Minetto
At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this year, Apple took people by surprise with the announcement of moving the Mac lineup to its own, custom silicon. During the conference, continuing with its annual course, the company also introduced the latest operating systems for its existing and upcoming hardware, which come packed with a slew of features and performance improvements over their predecessors. However, among these feature updates and changes, the one system element that was the focal point of these announcements, and is something that concerns users the most, is privacy.
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User privacy is something that Apple has been showing concerns around for quite some time. And that has been eminent with its statements, ad campaigns, and privacy-focused feature rollouts over the years. With its latest updates for the Mac, iPad, and the iPhone, Apple has doubled-down on these features and made changes to the existing ones to give users more control over their personal data. And, in turn, improve their privacy. The current iPhone operating system, iOS 14, in particular, gets a bunch of such new features and improvements on the existing and upcoming iPhones.
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1. Approximate location A lot of the apps on your iPhone require access to your location to function accurately. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of location permissions: precise and approximate. Until iOS 13, all apps and services relied on your precise location. However, with iOS 14, Apple has changed that for good and added a second permission option, approximate location. In layman terms, you
can think of precise location as your exact address — down to the street and an approximate address as just your city name.
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2. Camera and microphone recording indicator One of the notable changes on iOS 14, the one that has been getting all the attention lately, is the inclusion of a small (orange or green) indicator in the status bar. A recording indicator that appears right above the carrier strength bar and turns orange when an app uses the device’s microphone and becomes green when it uses the front camera. Thus, alerting you of
TREY the apps that have access to the camera and microphone on r e syour e a r c h device.
3. Privacy report in Safari Safari on iOS 14 comes with Apple’s intelligent tracking prevention functionality, which prevents websites from tracking you on the web, and in turn,
from creating your profile for targeted ads and analytics. To give you insights into the same, the browser offers a privacy report that lists down all the trackers it has blocked, the ones present on a website, and the ones that are the most prevalent.
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4. Limit app tracking Alongside preventing websites from tracking your online activity, Apple is also introducing tracking restrictions for apps. A lot of the apps on your device require tracking your activity across different apps and
websites to serve you targeted ads, improve the app experience, and other related purposes. Unfortunately, until now, you did not have much control over how apps track your web or cross-app activities. However, with iOS 14, that has changed, and you can now limit ad tracking.
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5. Private Wi-Fi address In addition to preventing apps and websites from
tracking your web activity by blocking them right away, iOS 14 also offers the private address functionality that limits advertisers and network operators from tracking your online activity. It works by using a different MAC (Media Access Control) address each time you connect to a network. A MAC address is a unique identifier that holds the key to a
range of details about a device and is required for identification every time a device tries to connect to a network.
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