It seems that everywhere you look, individual privacy is under attack. The latest front in the unending war on what's left of your right to privacy has opened up in the form of passive apps. If you haven't heard the news, be prepared for yet more grim tidings where your right to mind your own business is concerned.
What Are Passive Apps And Why Are They Tracking Me?
Some apps by their very nature have to track your exact location in order to function. There are a variety of theft recovery apps, for example, that unquestionably need to know where your phone is to even perform their function. If it didn't have that ability, you might as well uninstall the app, because the only thing it would be doing is taking up space.
For other apps however it's a different story. They track you, but they clearly don't need to do that in order to perform their primary function. Take the app FourSquare, for example. It's an eCommerce solution, and it doesn't need to know precisely where you are in order to do its job. It tracks you anyway, and not only that, it continues to track you passively, even when the app isn't running.
Before you get deeply offended at the FourSquare people, take a look on your phone (we'll show you where to go momentarily) to see how many other apps are doing the same thing. This is not a rare one off situation. You'll be amazed at how many apps are tracking your position even while they're not running. Just below, you'll find instructions on how to stop these apps in their tracks, depending on what kind of phone you've got.
Instructions For Android Users
Android users have it relatively easy. All you've got to do is force quit the application running in the background to get rid of it. The down side is, if you ever have to reboot your phone, you'll need to quit out of all the tracking apps again, which is a minor but persistent annoyance.
Instructions for iPhone Users
For iPhone users, it's a little trickier, but the added steps involved carry a few benefits. For starters, the entire passive tracking process relies on a feature called Background App Refresh. The good news about that being an actual feature of the OS is that it means there's a control panel and an on/off switch.
To access the Background App Refresh control panel, start by going into your phone's setting, and then selecting “General Settings.” Once there, you will see a menu item for Background App Refresh. Tap that to enter the control panel.
There are two basic ways you can deal with the problem. First, you can just turn the feature off lock, stock, and barrel. That solves it, but it could potentially render some of your apps pointless, as in the example of the theft recovery app mentioned above, so this might not be the optimal solution.
The other solution is a piecemeal approach. Every app with the little blue arrow next to it makes use of Background App Refresh. You can review each of these and toggle them off accordingly. Note though, that you will want to come back to this screen to check it every time you install a new app, as it may also be trying to track you.
This is just a small way for us to fight back in the war against unnecessary intrusion into our lives.
