SPAM CALLS BE GONE!
Registering takes five minutes and costs nothing, but it only binds callers who were already following the law. Scammers were never checking the list — here is what the registry actually buys you.
Topic
How-To Guide
A collection of 39 issues
Android Lockdown Mode
Two seconds on the power button drops the phone to PIN-only: no face, no fingerprint, no notification text on the lock screen. Worth finding the button before the moment you need it.
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.
Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (Encrypted Cloud Storage)
Switching it on takes a couple of minutes. The part that matters is the 28 characters Apple shows you once: lose them and nobody, Apple included, can open your iCloud data again.
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.
WebRTC - Embedded Content Tracking
You can be paying for a VPN and still hand a website your real IP address, because the browser feature that powers video calls asks for it directly. Test yourself first, then decide what runs in which browser.