Location Use in Apps
Late last year, Uber made headlines around changes to their application that required users to grant them permission to view their location at all times, not just while using the app. Their explanation for this new requirement was to “improve pickups, drop-offs, customer service, and to enhance safety”. It is up to the user to decide if the service provided by Uber is worth trading a potentially “always on” location or not.
Like me, I’m sure a lot of you use a number of apps that leverage your mobile phone’s location services. For the most part, these apps only need access to your location while being actively used — if at all. If you have a large number of apps, you should scroll through the list occasionally and verify which apps have access to your location and whether or not you are still comfortable with them using that data.
If you are an iPhone user, you can go into Settings > Privacy > Location Services and scroll through the apps.
Pay close attention to the apps that require “Always” access to your location. App developers may have required “Always” in previous versions but now have added (thank you!) the “While Using” option. Unless you go through the apps and downgrade from “Always” to “While Using”, they will continue to use “Always”.
Some apps won’t function at all without access to location, so fortunately, changing these values is something that can be done at any point and time. If you are concerned about access to your location, you can set the app to “Never” until you want to use it, turn it on, use the app, then turn it off.
Personally, I generally default to “While Using” unless I specifically never want an app to see my location. Apple also now requires app developers to provide a description as to why the app needs access to your location data.
Not to pick on Delta or Hertz, but I do not use the features listed in their reasons for needing location — so I just turn it off by default.
Apps list various reasons for why they need location, some are obvious — others less so.
My recommendation, if you can’t tell, try setting it to “Never” or “While Using” — very few if any apps are going to legitimately need “Always” to function properly.
If you are an Android user, depending on the version and manufacturer of your device, determining what apps use location and what they use is for can be difficult. The Android phone I currently use is the Google Pixel, running Android 7 (aka Nougat). There are two ways to check location from the Settings, you can select the Apps setting, or the Location setting.
If you go through the Apps setting, it will show you a list of all the Apps you currently have installed on your device. If you go through the Location setting, it will show you a list of the Apps that have most recently used Location services on your device.
Whether you go through the Apps setting or the Location setting, you can tap on any of the Apps to get to the App Details screen.
Looking at the screen, it shows you what Permissions the App is currently allowed to use. If “Location” is there, this app has access to your location. If it is not there, either the App does not need location or you have not granted the App permission to use Location. Drilling down into Permissions will give you the option to turn any of these on or off. Be aware that the App may not function properly without some or all of these turned on.
While it is not as easy to see all the Location usage in Android as it is iOS, with newer versions of Android you have control over location use. I recommend going through your list of apps and checking Apps that you don’t think need location — such as most games — and double checking their Location permission.
