Saturday, January 12, 2019

How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone's Microphone?

How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone's Microphone?
Are you wondering how to prevent apps from accessing your iPhone's microphone? Then you have to go through this post.

Recent times, the biggest concern while giving any apps with full access is PRIVACY. Apps with full permission can able to access your personal information that you would never want to share with anyone. The only way to stop getting things worse is to take them into your control.

Knowing about your personal information can make some companies into billionaires. So, here is the article on "How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone’s Microphone?”

In present days, privacy is becoming a more and more important aspect. And, when it comes to providing security, Apple has always been applauded for their privacy settings. Where Android is still lacking behind, because of its ease of developing the applications by almost anyone and update them to the Play Store.

Now if you want to know about How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone’s Microphone? then you can do that with the help of these useful steps in this post.

How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone’s Microphone?

Here is the step by step procedure to follow in order to limit the access to applications that use your microphone.

1. Open the settings app from your home screen menu.

2. Locate and tap on "Privacy" option.

3. You will find an option called "Microphone".

4. Click on the Microphone.

5. All the applications will be listed one by one.

6. Toggle the button to Off for whichever application you want to prevent accessing your microphone.

Wondering what's the big deal in switching off your microphone access to few applications?

For example, there are many applications like Whatsapp, TikTok and more.. that uses your microphone to send messages and record your voices.

There won't be much of a deal with well-established applications, as they might maintain some strict rules and will not misuse your voice data.
But, all companies will not be the same and you will end by paying much loss by providing full
access to those applications. Well, we are not against the usage of different applications, but keeping present technology in mind, privacy is all that matters the most.

Let's discuss about the few important preventions to be taken to improve your privacy.

1. Stop Giving Microphone Access to Apps:


For the very first time when you download and use an application, it will ask you to grant access to your Smartphone’s microphone. While it makes some sense to do it for apps like WhatsApp, but it may not be necessary for a few apps that seem to have more risk factors. If an application asks you for access to the microphone, click on "Don't Allow". Don't worry, even if you do provide access to any application, you can always go into the settings and remove access whenever you want.

How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone's Microphone?

We have to remember that stopping the complete access for an application might break its functionality to perform its fullest. For example, if you are using the Amazon application, if you limit microphone access, the voice search feature wouldn't work. If this is your main concern, you can always re-enable microphone access by repeating the steps mentioned above.

2. Disable 'Hey Siri' Feature: 


Not all applications will appear on the same "Microphone" window. Applications like Siri will not show up in those settings and you will need to turn it off using the below steps.

If you want Siri to stop listening for the "Hey Siri" voice all the time, you need to manually disable the feature.

1. Go to the Settings app and tap on "Siri & Search".

2. Go down and turn off "Listen for Hey Siri".

Remember, Siri will use your microphone only when you turn it on, it won't actively listen to all your voices in the background.


How to Prevent Apps from accessing your iPhone's Microphone?

3. Virtual Assistant: 


As, Virtual assistants are becoming popular and handy, but we should remember that they’re always listening. Almost all the applications are providing access to either voice search or voice controls. Yes, definitely they make life easy, but one thing we should not forget is that they are active and can track all our voice data. Question yourself as what happens to the audio files they gather?

Like we mentioned before that Apple's biggest strength is the security. Apple has the right to fire a developer’s account promptly upon notice for engaging in outlawed behavior, including but not limited to misusage of user data. Even though Apple provides the uttermost security, they stated that they cannot monitor what developers do with the user's data that they have collected, or cannot prevent the onward transfer of data collected.

Also, all the applications are screened thoroughly before they appear on the App Store. But still, Apple will not take any risk and wants to offer their customers an option to disable the access to your iPhone/iPad’s microphone.

Conclusion: 


And there you have it! Mainly remember that even when you gain full control over the applications you want and set your app permissions the way you like them, the damage can still be unsure about what the third party application developers will do with the info they collect. People will not take this into big notice, because we will not see something very serious so often.

But when it does, the thing will become worse than what we can imagine. So, the safest way to be aware of is not to download applications you don't trust. Many young people nowadays try almost all the applications as they are curious to know what all the applications offer irrespective of popularity. This might cause all the damage in the future, as data is what all that matters us the most on the internet.

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