Shield your iPhone fitness data from other apps’ prying eyes

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Keep your activity data private. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Keep your activity data private. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

With the advent of Apple’s motion coprocessor chip (the M8 in recent iOS devices), any apps that you download and grant permission to can use this data to enhance their offerings.

This lets apps like RunKeeper, Carrot Fitness and others both gather fitness data from your iPhone as well as send it to the Health app.

This could raise privacy concerns for some, so being able to decide which apps we allow to access our fitness-tracking data — or whether the iPhone tracks these activities at all — can be a helpful.

Here’s our recipe for getting finer-grained control over your fitness-tracking data.

Ingredients:

  • iPhone 5s, iPhone 6/6 Plus, iPad Air 2
  • Settings App
  • Directions:

    Tap into your Settings app on the iOS device you own that has an M7 or M8 chip. Next, tap onto the Privacy section, and then scroll down to — not Health — Motion & Fitness.

    Screenshot: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
    Screenshot: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

    You’ll see a toggle switch to turn Fitness Tracking OFF, as well as a toggle switch for each app you have on your iPhone or iPad that has requested access to your motion and fitness activity. My iPhone has RunKeeper, Health, MyFitnessPal, and Path Talk on it, so you’ll see those in the screenshot above.

    To disable any specific app from accessing your motion and fitness info, simply tap the green toggle switch to OFF next to any app you don’t want to share data with, and it will no longer be able to access the info. When you launch any of those apps the next time, they may ask you to grant permission again, however.

    To turn off Fitness Tracking altogether, then, just tap that top toggle switch to OFF, and your iPhone will no longer track your motion and fitness data. Boom! You’re private.

    If you want to reverse any of this, simply toggle the relevant switches to ON.

    Via: iPhoneHacks

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