A year ago, it was discovered that some applications for iOS (such as Twitter and Path) uploaded your address book on their servers. Numerous discussions and debates made this topic a hot one, and therefore Apple had to do something in their next iOS release. After a couple of weeks, the new iOS 6 beta release brought us a new privacy tab in the Settings app. Since then, you can fully customize the way apps use your information. Let’s proceed with going through each option of this feature.
First of all, you need to know that Privacy is enabled out of the box. The first time an application attempts to get any of your information, you’ll be prompted to give it access to that information. Should you grant or deny the access but later change your mind, Privacy settings comes at handy. The new Privacy tab in iOS 6 is located right below Brightness & Wallpaper.
As you can see, the Privacy tab is broken down into multiple sections:
Location Services
Location Services is turned On by default. Here you can find which apps have access to your location. Apps may need it for many reasons: show your location, geo-tag your photos, how nearby places of interest, etc. To prevent an app using your location information, just move the slider to Off.
If you scroll down to the bottom of Location Services, you can find the System Services tab. Here you can turn On or Off some system features that are using your location in background. Disabling most of them will significantly increase your battery life.
Contacts, Calendars and Reminders
Tap on one of these three sections of the Privacy settings and you can see the list of apps on your device that have or have not access to the information in your Contacts, Calendar and Reminders apps. To restrict access for one specific app move the slider to Off, just like we did it with Location Services.
Photos
Privacy for photos works basically the same way. Be aware that your photos may contain the GPS tag of where you took them. If you grant access to photos to an app, besides using them, it can see wherever you took your photos.
Bluetooth Sharing
There are few apps that can share data via Bluetooth, but you can manage them too. Apple says that apps can share data even when in background, however, I’m quite not sure that kind of apps even exist.
Facebook and Twitter
iOS stores your Facebook and Twitter login information if you had them inserted previously. You can manage which apps have got access to this information.
Advertising
Ads can track your actions around the web so that advertising companies could know how to bring you ads that you’re more likely interested in. But you may not want them to track you. To reduce the ad tracking that happens to you, move the Ad Tracking slider to Off.
HOW-TO: Manage Privacy Settings on your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch in iOS 6