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On the occasion of Data Privacy Day, remember that some tips can be put in place to better control the personal data accessible to third parties. On your smartphone in particular, they hold tracking advertising.
Today is Data Privacy Day, the day for the protection of personal data. You will have noticed that the past year has been prosperous in leaks of private elements. However, a few simple gestures can be useful for better control of what you deliver yourself to third parties without even knowing it. On your smartphone, it is thus possible to limit the tracking of your digital behaviors for advertising purposes.
iOS: disable ad tracking
Several solutions are available to you to best restrict the advertising targeting carried out by the apps installed on your smartphone. On iOS, the operation is particularly simple since Apple has deployed with its version 14.5 what it calls App Tracking Transparency. Intended above all for the management of applications that “suck up” the user’s private data in order to resell them for advertising purposes, this function offers everyone the possibility of authorizing follow-up requests, app by app.
Just go to the iPhone’s Settings app > Privacy to uncheck Allow App Tracking Requests. Apps will then no longer be able to request tracking permission. On the other hand, if you want to give preferential treatment to a specific app, all of the apps thus restricted appearing under the global authorization in Privacy, simply move the slider associated with it.
Android: Reset Advertising ID
On Android, the operation is not so simple, or at least not so readable. No doubt tickled by the measures taken by Apple, the Mountain View company drew its response at the end of 2021 by deploying an update to its Google Play services. Reserved for Android 12, i.e. Google Pixels and the smartphones of the few brands that have offered their update since its launch in the fall of 2021 (Samsung, Asus, OnePlus, etc.), the function is due to the user’s advertising identifier. It is through it that authorized apps repatriate the user’s personal information. You can therefore, provided your smartphone is recent or up to date, delete your advertising ID, which will replace this numerical sequence with a string of zeros if an application tries to access it. To do this, go to your smartphone’s settings, then to Privacy and Ads. You can, if you change your mind, create a new advertising ID there later.
In previous versions of Android, head to the same place and choose Disable Ads Personalization, a feature that’s been around for about five years. However, this option does not guarantee that apps do not access your Advertising ID, as it remains available. Note that while you are in the Privacy tab, you can change various settings related to your Google account, such as tracking your daily movements in the Google Location History tab…