15 Android Settings That Invade Your Privacy - 2023 Ultimate Guide To Turn Them Off Now!

On a recent video, I showed you how to keep your phone protected with several basic steps that you can use to strengthen your security and privacy. Today, I’ll show you 15 settings that are found in Android phones that you should disable. All of these settings are found in newer Android operating systems so if you have an older phone or one from a different brand, your settings might be in a different place. If all of these tips are things you’ve already done, then send this video to your family and friends and let me do the tech support for you!

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[DIAGNOSTIC DATA]

So, first we’re gonna disable some stuff you might’ve left on when you first got your phone. These are settings that Google, Samsung, or other providers might want you to opt into while you setup your phone and you may have just clicked ok and accept without actually realizing that these settings are optional. So go to your settings, scroll down to Security and Privacy, click on Privacy, then click on Other Privacy Settings. First, if Send Diagnostic Data is enabled, turn that off. This is a setting that let’s big brother Sammy collect data about your phones diagnostics and usage. It’s optional, turn it off.

Google also has a usage and diagnostics setting, so click into that one and turn it off for Android.

[CUSTOMIZATION SERVICE]

Customization service is an optional setting that lets apps customize your experience based on your interests and routines. This is more data that’s collected, so disable it for any apps you see here that don’t need it. As you can see, I’ve had this disabled since I first set up this phone so it’s entirely off. But I’m gonna turn this on so you can see what this page looks like. After I hit agree a couple of times, this page has a big toggle at the top, then you can click into customized apps to disable any apps one by one. Click on Data Management shows you all that data that’s sent to Samsung. You can toggle these one by one. OR you can just click that toggle at the top and turn it off entirely.

[ADS]

Click on Ads. This is general information that apps can use to customize ads you see. Your device has a special callsign called an Advertising ID. You can delete this data by clicking on Delete Advertising ID. You can also customize the types of data that apps can collect to show you ads under Ad Privacy. At the bottom, this page explains what each of these settings does. [ read page ] Disable each of these if you aren’t comfortable with this information being shared.

[ACTIVITY CONTROLS]

Then click on activity controls. These are Google activity controls so choose your google account, and we’ll start at the top. Web and App Activity saves your activity on google sites and apps to give you faster search results and recommendations, but you can disable that. You can also uncheck the subsettings which includes Chrome history and voice and audio activity.

Then I recommend turning on Auto Delete - which will delete all this data after a set amount of time, so you don’t need to keep remembering to go into this page and delete everything manually.

If you’re finding this video helpful, a subscribe would me a lot to me. Subscribing is a simple way of showing me which videos you find helpful and valuable, and it tells me which direction I should take my channel in.

[LOCATION HISTORY]

Scrolling down we can turn off Location History, which is pretty self explainatory. Then there is youtube history, which you can also disable.

[PERSONALIZED ADS]

Below this is personalized ads, which you can click into to customize your “ad experience” with google. Mine is funny, I got tech companies… travel brands… and then cracker barrel… Google is totally outing me and my obsession with southern food here.

So up at the top you can turn off personalized ads. Under Partner Ad Settings, scroll to the bottom, open this menu, and uncheck saving data from sites that partner with Google.

In my opinion, if you aren’t getting paid for it then it’s not your job to fix these products - let the manufacturers figure it out and pay their own employees a fair wage to run diagnostics.

[PERMISSIONS MANAGER]

Let’s find our Permissions Manager. Go to your settings, scroll down to Security and Privacy, click on Privacy, then click on Permission manager. Each app you install on your phone may ask you if you want to grant it permissions to access other parts of your phone. For example, when you download Instagram, it’ll ask you for permission to access your camera. That’s obvious, but what if you download something like an app to control your thermostat and it asks for camera permissions. It doesn’t really need camera permissions so you can deny it access to that feature of your phone.

If you ever accidentally grant permissions and want to remove them later, you can go into this settings page and turn off permissions. Like lets look at call logs. Ok scrolling down and all of these look logical but check out these at the bottom. Fitbit, Withings, and LaMetric Time asked for call log permissions. Y’all don’t need to see my call log so I’m gonna deny that.

Let’s look at Location… I need to disable a lot of these… Sometimes you’ll download an app and think that it needs access to all of these permissions so you approve everything, but once you start using it, you realize it never actually uses that location data for anything pertinent to the app’s features, so you can just go here and disable all the things. If something get’s wonky because you disabled location services, the app will tell you to turn it back on.

Another pro tip: Let’s look at Camera permissions. I don’t let ANY apps access my camera all the time.. That’s creepy. So I would recommend denying all the time access, and being really critical of which apps you do allow camera access to.

Clicking into an app like Instagram, it only gets camera access when I’m using the app. But clicking on permissions let’s me see everything Instagram has access to.

Tiktok is another one. Yes I use it - I’m a content creator - it’s a part of my job. Tiktok annoyingly keeps asking for access to my contacts and I deny it every single time. If I ever hit the wrong button, I can go in here and deny it.

This is a really important settings page.

Go back to Privacy and click on View All Permissions. This page goes into detail on which apps have used permissions during a given time. Clicking into any of these permissions will give you a timeline of when the apps accessed those specific tools. You can click into any that you don’t recognize or that you want to remove permissions for and choose to deny those permissions.

With all of these permissions pages - leaving them on could potentially drain your battery faster. So even if you don’t care about security and privacy - which you should - then there’s another reason to disable them that has nothing to do with cybersecurity.

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[SCAN FOR VULNERABILITIES]

Back out of these and go back to the Security and Privacy page and just click Scan to see if there’s anything you should fix or update on your phone. Make sure your lock screen is on, check that your accounts are secure, this is also where you can enable additional device protection like antivirus if it’s included in your operating system. I don’t have device protection turned on because I have good security hygiene and I don’t want it to continuously scan my phone, which has the caveat of it can drain your battery faster. Also it’s McAfee which is a bit bloated in terms of antivirus. You don’t really need this if you’re just downloading apps from the Google Play store, which I mentioned in my last phone security video!

And you can check for updates. I think it’s a good idea to audit these settings from time to time just to make sure everything is consistent with your current lifestyle.

[OFFLINE FINDING]

One setting I do want to point out is Offline Finding, which can allow you to find your lost device even when it’s not connected to a network, and it does this by allowing other Android devices. You can enable this if you’re worried about losing your phone, but if you do then I recommend encrypting offline location - this means your devices location is encrypted when it’s sent to other nearby Android devices, and it can only be decrypted by a PIN that you set.

[MAKE PASSWORDS VISIBLE]

Lastly on this page is the Other Security Settings option at the very bottom. Click on that then disable Make Passwords Visible. This option lets you see password characters for a second when you type them in before they change to an asterisk or a dot. Real talk, I was at an influencer even one time and the influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers got a special wifi network to log into that was faster. I definitely sniped the password because I saw a girl logging into it since I saw each character for a split second. Treat all your content creators equally, PR people, gosh. Give us all the fast internet. While you’re here, disable any admin apps under this option. None of your apps need admin privileges.

[WIFI AND BLUETOOTH SCANNING]

If you happen to be going to DEF CON, or you just wanna protect your phone from being seen if someone is wardriving through your neighborhood, turn off WiFi Scanning and Bluetooth Scanning. Both of these continuously send pings on various frequencies to look for local bluetooth devices or wifi networks, even when WiFi and Bluetooth is off in your drop down menu. This drains your battery and it also let’s attackers know where you are within a vicinity.

[MOBILE DATA]

Ok! Go back to the main settings page. Scroll down to Apps. This is where all of your apps are listed. You can also access their permissions here. But we’re gonna click into an app and choose Mobile Data, which let’s apps access data in the background while you aren’t using it. Talk about battery drain! Disable anything that doesn’t need to be on all the time. I do allow some of these to stay on for convenience or out of necessity - like YouTube music downloads a cache of music for me automatically and that’s fine.

[USAGE DATA ACCESS]

Click the 3 dots in the top right hand corner. Then click special access scroll down and click Usage Data Access. At the top it tells us that these apps can monitor other apps you use, know who your ISP is, and some other usage data. How bout no? Disable any that shouldn’t have access to that information.

[INSTALL UNKNOWN APPS]

Disable Installing Unknown Apps! On my Samsung S23 Ultra: I click on settings, go to Security and Privacy, scroll down to the bottom where it says Install Unknown Apps. Click on that and you’ll see a list of apps. So at the top it says “installing apps from this source may put your phone and data at risk”. I’d recommend disabling all of the apps listed here. If any of them are enabled, that means that app could install another app. So say you have the one for Chrome enabled. If you accidentally visited a malicious site while browsing Chrome on your phone and it installed an app - well, it could be malicious. Turn ‘em all off and don’t give them that option. Any apps you might want to install should be available in the Google Play Store or your phones app store.

[SENSORS]

Lastly is my pro tip: Turn on developer settings by going to About Phone, Software Information, then click on build number 7 times, enter your PIN. Now go back to your main menu and click on developer options. Scroll down to Quick Settings developer tiles, enable the one that says Sensors Off, and now you can adjust your phones sensors (like the accelerometer and gyroscrope) from your quick settings menu by pulling down from the top and toggling the little sensor icon on or off. Turning your sensors off WILL disable some of your phones features and you won’t be able to use them til you turn this back on. But this WILL remove some apps ability to capture this kind of data from nearby devices. Because it can disable general phone usage, I really don’t recommend using this unless you are in a rogue environment where top notch security is extremely important.

What are some settings you would recommend turning off on an Android phone? Should I do a video like this for iphones as well? Comment below! Thanks for watching, bye yall!