Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Digital Privacy

A collection of 36 issues

Account Privacy Dashboards

Apple, Google, and Microsoft each publish a page showing what they hold on you. Three links and half an hour tells you what is in the file, starting with whether Maps is still logging where you go.

App Privacy Report: What Your Apple Device Is Actually Doing

Switch it on, wait a day, then look for the entries that make no sense: the calculator with location access, the domain your phone talks to all night. Useful for spotting outliers, poor at everything else.

Disable Location Services (Android)

Precision is what makes location data worth selling. You will never be invisible to the network itself, but you can stop the apps on your phone from quietly building a record of where you sleep.

Opting Out of Google Ads Is Not De-Googling

Resetting your advertising ID is a two-tap fix with a narrow blast radius. Worth doing, and worth being honest about: Google is still stitched into everything else on the phone.

Disable Ad Tracking on Android (2026)

Android's ad tracking controls have moved, and the advertising ID is no longer going away. Where the settings are in 2026, what deleting the ad ID actually does, and what it does not fix.

Disable Ad Tracking on Apple Devices (2026)

Apple sells advertising too, and the profile used to aim it is built on your own device. Three separate switches, in three different places, and turning off one does nothing to the other two.

Remove Stored Wi-Fi Networks (Android)

Every network your phone has joined is stored, and network names map to street addresses in public databases. The path moved, and the one in most older guides is Samsung's, not Android's.

Safety Check and Access Audit (Apple)

Access accumulates quietly: a shared album, a partner's old device, an app you approved once and forgot. Apple built a wizard that lists all of it in one place, and one button that revokes the lot.