How to Find Out Which Apps Can See Your IPhone Personal Data
Each year, Apple releases new features that improve data privacy on the iPhone and set a new standard for the industry as a whole. In iOS 15, transparency is key. IOS 15.2 introduces a new feature called App Privacy Report, which provides a visual, easy-to-read report of all the ways an app uses or transfers your personal information.
How to enable app privacy report on iPhone and iPad
The App Privacy Report is one of the features that is not enabled by default after updating to iOS 15.2 or iPadOS 15.2. Go to Settings > Privacy > App Privacy Report and click Enable App Privacy Report to enable this feature.
Your iPhone will start logging app and network activity in the future. Go back after using some apps to view the data report.
How to read your app’s privacy report
If you use the function ” screen time” to track the use of your application, you may be familiar with this layout. The App Privacy Report will show you activity over the past week, broken down into four separate sections.
Access to data and sensors
This is where you’ll see when and how many times the app accesses your iPhone’s sensors or app data, including your camera, location, contacts, photo library, or microphone. This is where you’ll be able to determine if the app is accessing data that shouldn’t be – if so, you can navigate to a specific option to disable access.
Application network activity
This section is certainly helpful, but it can be a little difficult to understand. You will see complex domain names here, as well as common suspects like Google, Facebook, etc. All you need to know is that this application interacts with all the domains and sites you see here.
If you want to know about domains, members of the MacRumors community make up the current list of domains with bad actors . Take a moment to see if any of them make it to your list, and then see if you can uninstall the app that makes domain requests.
Website network activity
In this section, you will see the domains that were accessed by the websites that you viewed. When you click on a domain, Apple will tell you who owns it (if the data is available) and also show you which apps have accessed the data from the domain.
Most Popular Domains
In this section, Apple will combine and highlight the domains most frequently accessed by all of your applications combined. This is a good way to see similar sites that different applications are linking to; you may be a little surprised at what you find.
Right now, the Application Privacy Report is read-only; you can click the Share button to export the report to a separate file. Apple does not yet provide any controls or options to disable access to some data for attackers.