April 20, 2025

How to Make the Most of Apple’s New Privacy Tools in iOS 13

To turn on the feature, you open the Settings app, open the Phone menu and toggle on the switch for Silence Unknown Callers. When an unknown caller then tries to call, you will see a notification on your screen, but the phone won’t vibrate or ring. The caller is sent to voice mail.

This is a brute-force approach to shutting out robocallers, which makes it imperfect. When I tested this feature, I blocked six spam calls — but also missed several important work-related calls from people who were not yet in my address book.

Still, Apple’s tool is a decent temporary solution compared with several robocall-blocking apps that I have tested over the last several years. All of those were ineffective and let plenty of scam calls through.

Unbeknown to many of us, thousands of apps have been collecting our location data and selling the information to advertisers, retailers and hedge funds.

New buttons in iOS 13 help address this issue. In the past, when opening a newly downloaded app that wanted access to your location, you had the option of always sharing location data, sharing it only when the app was in use or never sharing location. Now when you open an app that is asking for your location, you can tap “Allow Once.”

If you tap it, you are explicitly giving the app permission to share your location that one time. That eliminates the app’s ability to continue pulling your location data in the background when you are not using it.

The annoying part of this is that if you tap Allow Once, you will be asked how you want to share your location data every time you open the app. But it’s worth using for peace of mind if you don’t fully trust an app that wants your location — a weather app from an unknown start-up, for example.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/technology/personaltech/privacy-tools-apple-ios-13.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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