Background refresh is what lets your iPhone and iPad download your email while your iPhone is sleeping, to update your weather app while you are sleeping, and to grab all kinds of data so that it’s ready before you need it — news feeds, notes-app syncing, and pretty much anything else.

However, as revealed this week by the Washington Post, plenty of bad apps are abusing the background refresh mechanism. They are using it to send your private data — you location, your email address, your phone number, and much much more.

It’s likely that this is happening to you, because background refresh is enabled by default for newly-installed apps. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to fix. Today we’ll see how.

Clear and Clear+, the popular list-keeping apps from Realmac Software, have been updated to take advantage of iOS 7’s new background refresh feature. This allows the apps to update even when they’re closed, ensuring your lists are up-to-date and ready for you when you open them up.

Here at Cult of Mac, we love Mailbox, the third-party Gmail client for iOS. But since it was optimized for iOS 7, it has been plagued by a hugely frustrating bug that causes email accounts to be deleted at random. Fortunately, the app’s latest update — which is available from the App Store now — finally fixes the problem.

But at what cost?