Data Privacy Day 2025 is celebrated on January 28 as an annual reminder for people to ensure that their personal data and privacy remains protected from various threats that can exist online and offline. Users should be well-informed of various privacy risks and issues, while learning how to deal with these challenges while safeguarding their privacy and personal information. If you use Apple devices, you can take advantage of several privacy-centric features designed for the company's smartphone and cloud services.
Here are some of the top features you can try out on your Apple device, in order to safeguard your personal information and privacy on Data Privacy Day 2025.
Top Apple Privacy Protections to Enable on Your Devices
- App Lock: If your iPhone is updated to iOS 18, you can "lock" an app using Apple's Face ID feature — or Touch ID on the iPhone SE (2022) — if you want to show your screen to another person. Once enabled, your iPhone will require a successful face or fingerprint scan every time you want to open the locked app, or view the contents of its notifications. You can also "hide" an app while locking it, and revealing the list of locked apps also requires biometric authentication.
- Hide My Email: Signing up for several online services can result in a lot of spam, while companies can also sell your personal information. In order to avoid spam and protect your privacy, you can enable the Hide My Email feature on iCloud+, which redirects email sent to a randomly generated email address to your real email inbox.
- Safety Check: Apple also makes it easy to see who has access to your personal data using the built-in Safety Check feature. It is located in the Settings app, and you can see which apps and individuals can view your information.
- Limited Contact Sharing: On older versions of iOS, you would have two options when an app requested access to your contacts — accept or decline. Once you update to iOS 18, you can choose to share specific contacts with a particular app on your smartphone.
- Recording Indicators: This privacy feature has been available since iOS 14, and it is also seen on Android smartphones. It displays two coloured dots when the camera and microphone are being used by any app. You can even pull down the Control Center and check which apps are currently using the camera or mic on your iPhone.
- Approximate Location: Some apps don't really need you to provide your precise location — such as weather apps. Instead, you can grant the app access to your "approximate" location, showing it a general area of around 10 square miles (around 16 square km).
- Locked Private Browsing Windows: Like the App Lock feature, you can also protect your private browsing tabs on iOS using Face ID or Touch ID. This prevents unauthorised users from viewing your browser tabs. Keep in mind that Safari will ask for Face ID or Touch ID even if you briefly switch to another app and open the browser again, which can get quite tedious after a while.
- iCloud Private Relay: If you don't want to spend a lot of money on a VPN, Apple offers a feature called iCloud Private Relay. This feature prevents trackers and advertisers from seeing your IP address when you visit their website, but you might have to solve a few more CAPTCHAs while searching on Google.
- Link Tracking Protection: While desktop browsers like Chrome and Firefox support extensions that remove additional tracking code at the end of a URL, Safari users were previously expected to manually remove the unwanted part of the link. Now, you can paste your link in the Mail or Messages app.
- App Privacy Report: Apple also lets you see exactly when an app attempted to access your information, and what domains the app connects to, in the form of a handy report. If you're trying to get rid of pesky applications that are constantly accessing your personal data, you might want to enable this feature right away.