15 Android Settings That Invade Your Privacy - 2023 Ultimate Guide To Turn Them Off Now!

on a recent video I showed you how to keep your phone protected with several different basic steps that you can use to strengthen your security and your privacy today I will show you 15 settings that are found in Android phones that you should disable all of these settings are found in newer Android operating systems so if you have an older phone or one from a different brand your settings might be a little bit different if all of these tips are things that you've already done then send this video to your family and friends and let me do the tech support for you this video is sponsored by delete me so stick around for a great discount and find out how you can scrub your data from the internet the easy way let's go ahead and start with diagnostic data so first we are going to disable some stuff that you might have left on whenever you first got your phone and set it up these are settings that Google Samsung or other providers might want you to opt into while you set up your phone and you may have just clicked okay and accepted without actually realizing that these settings are optional so to do do this we're going to scroll down tap the little gear icon for settings I am using an s23 ultra so this is what my settings page looks like I'll scroll down to security and privacy where's security and privacy there it is Click there then scroll down and click on privacy and then click on other privacy settings first you see this little toggle switch right here if that's set to on go ahead and turn that off that is an optional toggle you do not need to leave that on so go ahead and disable that that is actually a setting that lets Big Brother Samy collect data about your phone's Diagnostics and usage it is completely optional so just turn it off now Google also has a usage and Diagnostics setting so click into that one and turn it off for Android that can be found right here it says usage and Diagnostics if that is turned on go ahead and turn it off like so customization service found right here I'm going to let that load is an optional setting that lets apps customize your experience based on your interests and routines this is more data that is collected about you and your phone so disable it for any apps that you see here that you don't need it connected for as you can see here at the bottom I have had this disabled since I first set up this phone so it's entirely off I've never actually turned it on but I'm going to go ahead and turn this on so I can show you what it looks like so I turn that on I hit agree a couple of times and then this opens up the customization service page so there's this big toggle up at the top you just just have to hit that to turn off customization service entirely or if you want to you can click into customized apps and you will see apps here that have customization service turned on so you can turn any of those off that you don't want collecting your data and I'm just going to recommend just turning the entire thing off so that it never collects that data you don't really need it on now we're still under this customization service option click on data management so data management shows you all that data that's sent to Samsung you can toggle these one by one or you can just click that toggle again at the top of the customization service page and just turn it off entirely so that's what I'm going to do hit stop and we can go back Okay now click on ads so this is general information that apps can use to customize ads that you see your device has a special call sign I'm going to call it a call sign because I'm a ham radio operator it's called an advertising ID you can delete this data by clicking on delete advertising ID so scroll down click delete advertising ID and then just click right there now if you have this on you can also customize the types of data that apps can collect to show you ads under ad privacy click on ad privacy here and at the bottom of this page it will tell you exactly what each of these different options means so add topics allows Android to note topics of Interest based on the apps that you've used recently and how frequently you use them app suggested app ads allows apps that you use they can also determine what you like based on how you use them and lastly we have ad measurement apps you use can ask Android for information to help them measure the performance of their ads Android lets apps collect limited types of data so if you want to you can click into each of those and disable all those different options there you go just like that now go back to the other privacy settings and choose activity controls these are Google activity controls so choose your Google account and then we will start at the top web and app activity is the very first thing you're going to see right here this saves your activity on Google sites and apps to give you faster search results and recommendations but you can disable that in order to do so click turn off and then click turn off right there now if you just turn it off it's not going to delete any previous activity so you can also choose turn off and delete activity right now I'm going to leave that on so I can show you the other settings you can also uncheck any sub settings that currently have the blue check marks next to them this includes Chrome history and voice and audio activity right underneath this if for some reason you choose to leave that on I would highly recommend going into your auto delete options and turning on auto delete this will delete all that data after a set amount of time so you don't need to keep remembering to go into this page and deleting everything manually if you are finding this video helpful a subscribe would mean so much to me subscribing is a simple way of showing me which videos you find helpful and valuable and it tells me which direction I should take my channel in all right let's go back down to my phone and scroll down you will see an option for location history now location history is pretty self-explanatory you can turn off location history in the exact same way that you turned off the web activity just above that scroll down there is YouTube history you can also disable that completely if you would like to so just hit turn off if you want to disable YouTube history now underneath there is personalized ads which you can click into to customize your ad experience with Google so let's click into my ad experience here and scroll down and see what happens okay mine is kind of weird I've got uh Amazon here and Comcast and Verizon a bunch of ads for things that I don't even use DOA Telecom what colourpop Cosmetics that makes sense they just released a Sailor Moon collab Tumi a travel brand Cracker Barrel they're calling me out on my obsession with Southern food here thanks a lot Google that can show you exactly what kind of ads that are being personalized to your specific account so you can go in here and you can delete ones that don't make sense to you like a deutche telecom I don't need to see that so got it fewer ads from this brand are heading your way I don't mind the Cracker Barrel ads though that's fine they'll just make me hungry but to be honest I really don't want any of these ads to be shown to me so way up at the top click on turn off personalized ads this is really going to ask you hey you probably want to leave this on so you get a bunch of personalized stuff but honestly you can just turn it off I'm going to leave mine on right now so I again I can show you all the different settings go back and you'll see this option that says partner add settings so go ahead and click on that scroll all the way to the bottom open this little fold down menu that you see here and uncheck this box if it is checked this will uncheck saving data from sites that partner with Google so all this looks pretty invasive and in my opinion if you aren't getting paid for it then it's not your job to fix these products for example with Diagnostics and usage data let the manufacturers figure that out and pay their own employees a fair wage to run their own Diagnostics they don't need to get that data from your phone now let's go ahead and find our permissions manager so starting again with the gear icon up at the top click on the gear icon and then go down in your settings until you see security and privacy again we're going to click on on privacy and then the first option you see which is permission manager now each and every single app that you install on your phone may ask you if you want to Grant it permissions to access other parts of your phone for example when you download Instagram it will ask you for permission to access your camera that one's kind of obvious Instagram is used to share photos and videos so that one makes sense but what if you download something like an app to control your thermostat and it asks for camera permissions well it doesn't really need camera permissions so you can deny it access to that feature on your phone if you ever accidentally Grant permissions and you want to remove them later you can go into this settings page and turn off permissions for whatever thing that you had granted like let's look at call logs for example okay so scrolling down everything looks pretty logical like Google F yeah of course that's my phone carrier of choice the pixel watch in case I want to make calls through there all of that makes sense but if I scroll down to the bottom you will notice that there's Fitbit the metric time and wings or wiing depending on who you are now I'm going to show you something this this right here that is the lametric time it's a clock it does not need access to my call log so that was one of those items that I immediately denied permissions for I was like no you don't need that I'm not making calls through my YouTube counter I'm just not doing that okay here's another one let's look at location this is a fun one I need to disable a lot of these some of makes sense allowed all the time like Nest yeah that makes sense maybe not Google I might want to disable that one if I scroll down though ecolor life allowed only while using the app uh that's This Little Light it lights up and that's all it does I don't think this needs access to my location if it does to connect via Bluetooth I'll just make it ask every time so I'm going to switch it to ask every time see here's the thing sometimes you will download an app and think that it needs access to all of these permissions so you approve everything but once you start using it you realize that it never actually uses that location data for anything pertinent to the app's features so you can just go here and disable all the things of course if something gets wonky because you disabled location services for example the app will tell you to turn it back on before you can use the app so you can always just go back in and enable it if it makes something act weird now I'm going to show you my camera permissions because this is an important one too when we look at camera permissions you will notice that I don't let any apps access my camera all the time because that's kind of creepy right so I would recommend denying all the time access especially to things like your camera and being really critical of which apps you do allow camera access to now if I scroll down I will see Instagram here clicking on an app like Instagram it only gets camera access whenever I'm using the app but clicking on permissions lets me see everything that Instagram actually has access to now Tik Tok is another one here we go I'll open open Tik Tok yes I do use Tik Tok I am a content creator it's a part of my job so it's it's on there for a reason Tik Tok annoyingly keeps asking for access to my contacts and I deny it every single time but if I ever accidentally for some reason hit the wrong button I can always go in here and tell Tik Tok to deny access to my contacts it's right there and if I ever want to change it I can hit allow or don't allow and I can always just go back to don't allow if I accidentally turned it on so I would say that your app permissions page and your permissions manager is a very very important page and it's an important one to know where to access it now we're going to go back to this privacy page and click on view all permissions so this page goes into detail on all the different apps and details on which apps have used permissions during a given time now you can click into any of these permissions and that will give you a timeline of when the apps had access those specific tools so let's choose my camera cuz I'm always using my camera camera you can click into anything that you don't recognize for example if Instagram for some reason did not need access to my camera I could click there and click ask every time or don't allow now with all of these permissions Pages leaving them on could potentially drain your battery life faster as well so even if you don't care about security and privacy which you should then there is another reason to disable them that has nothing to do with cyber security now here's a step that you can take online to protect your data because you can protect your phone all day but if your data is already online it's easy for anybody to find it data broker websites make our data easily searchable publicly available and that's data like your full name your home address your phone number your email address and more and yes you can totally go to each of these sites one by one find your data request that they remove it but that could take days every single month to do because there are so many data Brokers out there there's hundreds so I signed up for delete me many many years ago as a paid customer and they take the hassle and stress off my shoulders delete me sends those opt outs to all those different data Brokers so that I don't have to by searching all of the data broker websites they send them all those manual opt out requests all I have to do is chill and read the report every couple of months even though several of my friends who work in cyber security did recommend delete me to myself I realized that you might be a little sus about trusting a company to do this work for you delete me takes a very strong approach to data security as well with Regulatory Compliance internal and external auditing multiactor authentication for your account and security awareness training for their own employees and when it comes to threat monitoring delet me monitors their own network traffic 24/7 for anomalies and they encrypt personal information both in transit and at rest and if you are skeptical you can always Reach Out directly to delete me with your own security questions so if you are ready to take control over your data online online especially that phone number and your email address and your home address then check out join delet me.com Mor code to get 20% off any of their consumer plans with the coupon code snubs that's SNS which will automatically apply at checkout at that link that's join delet me.com mores code just like the name of the show for 20% off with coupon code snubs thank you so much to delete me for sponsoring this episode now we're going to back out of all these settings and go back to that security and privacy page and just click scan to see if there's anything that I should scan and look for right now there we go we're scanning okay so if it finds anything it will show you some different options up at the top so we'll look through my options right now if you don't have lock screen already enabled which you should then you can choose to enable your lock screen here so make sure your lock screen is on check that your accounts are secure so I can go down here and make sure my accounts are secure this one is going to tell me that my password hasn't been changed in a long time my password is incredibly long so I'm not going to worry about that right now but I will change it eventually it also says that there's recent app activity and this kind of makes sense because I have a lot of different phones that I've been reviewing lately so a lot of different things have been logged into my Samsung account so that's also something that you should audit too if you have several different devices is go in here from time to time and audit what devices have access to your account this is also where you can turn on find my mobile and then there's app security let's talk about that one really quick this is where you can enable additional device protection like antivirus if it's included in your operating system now I don't have device protection turned on because I have good security hygiene and I don't want it to continuously scan my phone which does have that caveat of it can drain your battery faster also it's macap which is a bit bloated in terms of anti viers it's decently fast on a phone but again that's not something that I want turned on all the time you don't really need this if you are just downloading apps from the Google Play store which I mentioned in my last phone security video as well so underneath there we can check for updates I think it's a good idea to audit those settings from time to time just to make sure everything is consistent with your current lifestyle and you've made sure that everything is up to date now one setting that I really do want to mention is this offline finding which can allow you to find your lost device even when it's not connected to a network and it does this by allowing other Android devices so go and to offline finding if you want that turned on you can enable this if you are worried about losing your phone but if you do then I recommend encrypting offline location right there this means your device's location is going to be encrypted whenever it's sent to other nearby Android devices and it can only be decrypted by a pin that you set so when you encrypt it it's going to ask you to turn on a 1 2 3 4 5 six digigit pin and then you can click save I actually prefer not having my phone find able so I'm going to leave that off now lastly on this security and privacy page all the way down at the bottom is this setting that says other security settings click into that on this page we're going to disable make passwords visible so turn that off right there this is an option that lets you see password characters for like a split second while you're typing them in before they change into an asterisk or a DOT now real talk I was at an influencer event one time and the influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers got a special Wi-Fi network to log into that was faster than all of us Normie influencers now I definitely sniped the password because I saw this girl logging into it since I saw each and every character that she was putting in for a split second so treat all your content creators equally give us all access to the same fast internet PR people gosh anyway that was a side story but while you're here go ahead and disable any admin apps under this option as well none of your apps need admin privileges okay folks so this is right underneath that make passwords visible section so click into that and then you can disable anything that was turned on for example find my device could have been an optional one that was turned on but mine's already turned off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning now if you happen to be going to a place like Defcon which is the biggest hacker convention in the US or you just want to protect your phone from being seen if somebody is W driving through your neighborhood you can turn off a couple of settings these are Wi-Fi scanning and Bluetooth scanning so to do so we're going to go back to our main settings page scroll down find location for location services click on location services and then turn off Wi-Fi scanning and Bluetooth scanning right there and right there so both of those options continuously send pings to various frequencies to look for local Bluetooth devices or Wi-Fi networks even when Wi-Fi and bluetooth is off in your drop- down menu this can drain your battery and it also lets attackers know where you are within a vicinity now if you do want to continue allowing apps to use Wi-Fi for more accurate location and if you need to let apps use Bluetooth for more accurate location then you can keep those enabled if you're not in an environment where you need to worry about having those different things make your phone vulnerable all right next up is mobile data so go back to the main settings page you'll know you're there if you just hit the gear icon in your drop down menu or it says settings at the top scroll all the way down until you see an option that says apps Just Apps this is where all of your apps are listed you can access all of those apps permissions here but we're actually going to click on an app and choose mobile data which lets apps access data in the background while you aren't using it so talk about battery drain now I need to find one that actually has mobile data turned on so I can show you what it looks like most of mine are turned off actually but I think think Instagram has this on because I allow it to update in the background oh my gosh I have so many apps where is Instagram all right so in O that's a lot mobile data 9.29 gigs used since June 5th that's a lot of mobile data so if I wanted to I could just disable allow background data usage right there and that will disable Instagram from being able to do that which will also save some battery disable anything that doesn't mean to be on all the time I do allow some of these to stay on for convenience or out of necessity another great example is uh YouTube music so if I scroll all the way to the bottom so many apps YouTube music I do allow this to download new songs in the background and cache music for me automatically so I'll just leave that on all right also from this crazy app menu these three dots up at the top that's going to let you access another menu so click on those three dots and then click on special access right here scroll down and click on usage data access at the top it tells us that these apps can monitor other apps that you use they know who your ISP is and some other usage data so how about no disable any that should not have access to that information and in my case that's going to be quite a few so I'm going to turn off a lot of those next we're disabling installing unknown apps this is a really important one so on my s23 ultra I click on the gear I click on settings so I'm on the settings menu again right here as you can see again we're scrolling down to security and privacy where you at there it is scroll all the way down to the bottom where it says install unknown apps and click on that here you're going to see a list of a bunch of different apps so at the top it says installing apps from this Source may put your phone and data at risk I would just recommend disabling all of the apps listed here if there's any of them enabled that means that app could install another app so say you have the one for Chrome Chrome enabled if you accidentally visited a malicious site while browsing Chrome on your phone and it installed an app well it could be malicious so turn them all off don't give them that option any apps that you might want to install should be available in the Google Play store or your phone's app store all right last off is a pro tip this one's kind of cool I learned it when I went to Defcon many years ago and now it's really easy to access so turn on developer settings by going to about phone which is going to be on the main settings page scroll to the bottom go to about phone click on software information then click on this build number and that is going to turn on developer mode it may ask you for a pin so you will need to type in your pin and then you will turn into a developer so go back to your main menu and then you'll see an option down at the bottom that says developer options so click on developer options and this is going to give you a brand new menu page scroll down to Quick Settings developer tiles right here here and click into that and enable the one that says sensors off it's right here this will let you adjust your phone's sensors so that can be things like your accelerometer or the gyroscope from your quick settings menu by pulling down from the top and toggling the little sensor icon on or off so in my example I can pull down here and here's the little sensors right here on or off and that's what it looks like it's super super easy now when you do that turning your sensors off will disable some of your phone's features and you won't be able to use them till you turn that back on but this will remove some apps ability to capture that kind of data from nearby devices about your own phone but because it can disable General phone usage I really don't recommend using this unless you are in a rogue environment like you're going to Defcon where topnotch security is extremely important so what are some settings that you would recommend turning off on an Android phone should I do a video like this for iPhones as well because they do have different options comment down below thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye y'all

Channel: Shannon Morse

Views: 13,163

Keywords: google location history, android settings, location services, android settings to turn off, install unknown apps, android settings you should change, android privacy settings, android privacy features, android battery, device admin apps, android security settings, google privacy, android privacy, send diagnostic data, permission manager, ad personalization, app permissions, android settings you should turn off, turn off these android settings

Id: ZOz1iKG1AEE

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023