8 common things your smartphone knows about you

Android is an open source OS for smartphones and tablets from Google

By Lekhaka

| Published: Saturday, August 18, 2018, 19:25 [IST]

Smartphones have become something people carry around everywhere they go, we have come to rely on them for a multitude of things. Smartphones have conditioned us to treat mundane everyday things which we used to do without a second thought as uphill tasks of great difficulty.

8 common things your smartphone knows about you

While it’s true that smartphones have made our lives much easier than it used to be, there is a price to pay for all that convenience. Every time you allow an app to do something, you might be allowing the app to learn information that you might not feel comfortable about your smartphone knowing. With your passcodes, passwords, and location being saved in smartphones, these are the things that you need to be aware of:

Location History

Both iPhones and Android phones are equipped with internal tracking devices, this allows it to see your location at any point in time. If your "Location Services" have been switched on, your phone has most likely compiled a long list of the places that you've been to. This is a feature that is often turned off because of its tendency to consume a lot of battery life. Although there are apps like Uber and Airbnb that turn it on if you have authorized them to.

Siri

The software license agreement states that Apple collects data from Siri to "understand you better and recognize what you say." However, the information that you collect is connected to your phone with a random ID instead of your Apple account in order to ensure anonymity.

Personal IDs

Personal Identification Information (like passcodes) were found to be used by China-based Android smartphone company OnePlus. Although their side of the argument was that they were using this information for the purpose of improving user experience, and rolled back the privacy breach, it was still a serious invasion of privacy.

Passwords

Logging into an app or website on your smartphone might be much easier if you answer ‘Yes' when prompted to save your password. But giving Google, your smartphone or other sketchy websites access to your information might not be the wisest of ideas.

Messages

Those message conversations that an iPhone user has on his/her phone is still around even if you're an iPhone user that deletes texting/iMessage conversations, Apple keeps messages in an encrypted form "for a limited period of time" before they actually get deleted, this is to "ensure that they get delivered and read properly". Although the duration for which these messages are kept around for has not been revealed.

Everything you’ve Googled

The moment that you sign in to your Android device using your Google login, your phone will become linked to all of your other Google accounts. Google will have access to information about all the things that your phone does. This includes the length and type of your phone calls, your location and much more.

The speed at which you’re traveling

If you have used a map to navigate, you will surely have received a message saying "It will take you ___ minutes to get to so and so place." The iPhone tracks more than just your location, it also notes down the time it takes to arrive and leave.

The information that you’ve given to your apps.

There are apps that cater to both Android and iPhone devices that keep track of a large amount of data. You will be able to restrict the amount of information that the apps receive but this might decrease the accessibility of the app.