How to Prevent Your Smartphone From Tracking Your Fitness
You can tell it’s January from all the gym selfies, fitness tracker screenshots, and overly enthusiastic photos of carbohydrate-free meals flooding your social media feeds. While you may have decided to focus on something other than your daily step count, your phone has a different idea.
Almost all smartphones now have some form of built-in motion tracking, and most of them collect this data in the background by default. Luckily, turning off fitness and activity trackers on your phone is easy. You might even find that it’s easier to pay due attention to your health and fitness without unnecessary app reminders (and extra data privacy never hurts, either).
Turn off fitness trackers on iPhone
- Go to Settings> Privacy> Motion & Fitness.
- Disable Fitness Tracking to disable iPhone pedometer, body movement, and other activity tracking features for all apps.
- Alternatively, you can turn off activity tracking for each app by going to Settings> Privacy> Motion & Fitness to see a list of apps that have access to your activity data. Tap the slider next to an app to prevent it from accessing your fitness trackers.
Disable fitness trackers on Android
Android phones also have built-in step tracking, but the process for turning it off is different for different devices and Android OS versions. You should be able to search your phone settings for “pedometer,” “step tracking,” or “fitness tracking” to see if these options are available to you.
However, some Android devices don’t track your steps by default and may instead rely on additional apps like Google Fit or third-party trackers, in which case you can simply uninstall or disable those apps so they can’t track you. This can usually be done by pressing and holding an app on the app launcher screen, and then dragging it to uninstall, disable, or uninstall at the top of the screen.