Check out Apple's Personal Safety User Guide and audit your sharing with Safety Check!

Intro: Apple has a great resource to help users take control of their privacy and security with Apple Products. Check out the highlights below, and use "Safety Check" today if you have an iPhone!

This post is also available on my substack.

Why does this matter?

There are lots of great features on our Apple devices that make it easy to share locations, files, and photos with people, as well as ways to share with ourselves across devices (i.e. iMessage on my phone and my computer). But it’s easy to lose track of what (types of information) have been shared and with who (people or apps), and you might be inadvertently sharing private information with people or apps that you shouldn’t be anymore.

Having good sharing hygiene is a great preventative measure to prevent things stalking, extortion, and other harm.

What is Apple’s Personal Safety User Guide?

This is a resource put out by Apple to help those concerned about Apple technology being used against them for nefarious reasons. This guide has information for iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watch, and HomePod.

In this post, I highlight some cool features this guide discusses. This is an excellent reference for now and in the future, so take a look and bookmark it!

Safety Check - Review all sharing in one spot

Safety Check is available on iOS 16 and later (make sure you are updating your iOS automatically) and is a great tool to easily allows you to review who you are sharing with and gives you the tools to change those sharing settings in one place.

To get there: Go to Settings —> Privacy & Security —> Safety Check

Do an Emergency Reset if you need to immediately stop all sharing (this is a one-click to stop all sharing option).

For a routine audit, click “Manage Sharing & Access,” and it takes you through 3 Steps:

Step 1: Review sharing for Find My, Health, Photos, Notes, Calendar, and Home. It’s easy to forget who and what you have shared, and it’s good to clean that up (the privacy & security principle here is to share only what you have to!). What’s great about this feature is you can review it by looking at two categories: 1) People and 2) Information Shared. This allows you to look at how you share from two perspectives—the who and the what.

Step 2: Review sharing for Apps. Similarly, you can view this by Apps and by Information Shared, allowing you to look at the who and the what. The Apps view organizes it by apps with the most sharing at the top, which is also helpful. For example, I learned that the Avis app had access to my calendar (why?) — easily disabled in this tool!

Step 3: Review Account Security (Devices, Trust Phone Numbers, Emergency SOS Contacts). This step looks at which devices you are signed into with your Apple ID (if you don’t recognize a device, you can remove it) and trusted phone numbers.?

Review and Take Action Section

This section contains information on how to share content securely. Here are some highlights:

1. Review configuration files.

Device configuration profiles, mobile device management (MDM) tools, and custom apps may be used by organizations (like schools and businesses) to manage or supervise devices, and these tools may allow access to data or location information on the device.

If you see a configuration profile installed on your device that isn’t supposed to be there, you may be able to delete it, depending on who installed it. Doing so deletes all of the settings, apps, and data associated with the configuration profile.

This is a good reminder that if your device is provisioned by work or school, you probably don’t have the privacy you think you might.

2. Manage Family Sharing settings.

Family sharing can be used by up to five family members to share subscriptions, purchases, photos, photo albums, a calendar, and more, all without sharing each other’s Apple accounts.

There are also ways to remove yourself from a family group or to remove individuals from a family group.

Privacy and Safety Tools Section

This section goes over Apple's features for keeping your information safe. Some highlights:

1. If you get locked out of your Apple device.

Account recovery contacts are trusted people who can help you regain access to your account if you forget your password or device passcode, or if your password or passcode was changed without your permission. Account recovery contacts don’t have access to your account; they only have the ability to send you an account recovery code if you need one. Set up an account recovery contact on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac so that you can regain access to your data if you ever get locked out.

2. Make an emergency call on iPhone (and notify your emergency contacts).

With Emergency SOS, you can quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that the person or people assigned as emergency contacts are people you trust.

• Turn Call with Hold on or off: Press and hold the side and volume buttons to start a countdown to call emergency services.
• Turn “Call with 5 presses” on or off: Rapidly press the side button five times to start a countdown to call emergency services.

3. Harden your devices against mercenary spyware with Lockdown Mode

Lockdown mode is a feature worth knowing about, but also hopefully something you won’t have to use.

Lockdown Mode is an extreme, optional protection for iPhone, iPad, and Mac (running iOS 16, iPadOS 16.1, and macOS 13) that should be used only if you believe you may be targeted by a highly sophisticated cyberattack, such as by a private company developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware.

When a device is in Lockdown Mode, it won’t function as it typically does. Apps, websites, and features are strictly limited for security, and some experiences aren’t available. Lockdown Mode includes the following protections:

• Messages: Most message attachment types other than images are blocked. Some features, like link previews, are disabled.
• Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies, like just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compilation, are disabled unless the user excludes a trusted site from Lockdown Mode.
• Apple services: Incoming invitations and service requests, including FaceTime calls, are blocked if the user has not previously sent the initiator a call or request.
• Tethered connections: Connections with a computer or accessory are blocked when the device is locked.
• Configuration profiles: Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device is unable to enroll into mobile device management (MDM) while Lockdown Mode is turned on.

Checklists

As part of this guide, Apple has also provided three checklists that walk you through specific activities. These are:

1. Limit access checklist
2. Stop sharing checklist
3. Manage location sharing checklist

I highly recommend looking at Apple’s Personal Safety User Guide and remembering it for future use. At the very least, use Safety Check to do a quick audit of your sharing to ensure you aren’t inadvertently sharing information with people or apps you don’t want to.

Stay Safe!

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