Switching Off 1 Phone Setting Could Help Protect Your Safety

At this point, most of us have happily dumped our entire lives into the cloud — we have our pictures, credit information, and so much more floating around in the digital atmosphere — and, for the most part, it makes our lives better. We can instantly access anything we need — and that’s great — but that means other people, including those with nefarious intentions, can also potentially get ahold of our personal info.

Using smart, complex passwords to safeguard our accounts and choosing secure sites to do our banking and shopping is important, but what else do we need to be doing to keep our data from falling into the wrong hands?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — wanted to find out on our most recent episode, so we chatted with Alysa Hutnik, a privacy lawyer with Kelley, Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, D.C. And, boy, did we discover how much we need her help, as we aren’t doing nearly enough to protect our digital selves.

But we were also surprised to learn that making one small adjustment on our smartphones could keep us safer physically too.

“By default, a lot of people leave their location tracking on or choose to always — not just when you’re using the app — but always choose to allow your location to be collected,” Hutnik told us. “And if you think about our patterns — we come back to the same place at night most nights — to our home. We go to the same places for work. We have the familiar patterns. Your location is really personal.”

Just think about how many apps have access to your location, and then ask yourself how many of them really need that information.

“You have the choice to not share your location all the time or really be intentional