Jason Cosper

I came down with something nasty this weekend and quarantined myself away from my partner, who’s neck deep in finals and, frankly, can’t afford to catch whatever I’ve got. Now, there’s no working TV in my office. So after far too many hours of watching videos on my laptop, my brain started looking for a project.

Eventually, I landed on cracking open Settings → Privacy & Security → Safety Check → Manage Sharing & Access on my iPhone.

If you’re on iOS and haven’t poked around in there since they introduced it a few years ago, it’s honestly worth an hour of your time.

The Safety Check wizard walks you through everybody and everything you’re sharing data with. All your friends who have access to shared notes and calendars. The apps you’re letting peek at your location, microphone, bluetooth, camera, and photos.

In Safety Check you can reset those permissions per app. Then, the next time you open that app, it’ll ask (again) for whatever it claims to need. That’s when you get a chance to be choosier. Maybe a customer loyalty app gets “Allow Once” for your location info (which means it has to ask every time it wants to know) instead of always lowkey knowing where you are.

Or maybe you tell it that it only gets to see where you are while the app is actually open. AFAIK, running in the background technically counts as open. So maybe just stick with using “Allow Once” even if it is kind of annoying.

Once I sorted through all that, I started in on deleting apps.

My rule was a simple one: You don’t have to delete it forever. You just have to be okay with not having it on your phone in an emergency.

Car insurance and banking can stay. I don’t need a rewards app for Popeye’s always sitting on my phone tho. Even if I do like their chicken, the app’s not really earning its rent.

I don’t need the Albertson’s app passively logging me between grocery runs either. Especially since I don’t even shop there all that often. Besides, I can install it again after I’ve pulled into the parking lot if I really need it.

I’m not trying to go all straight edge with my phone. All I want to do is keep myself from leaking too much of my personal data all over the place.