In iOS 16, Apple continues to integrate new features to protect your privacy. Here are four new features you can use right now.
Apple iOS 16 brings a number of new features and other changes to your iPhone, but not everything is necessarily visible. A founding principle of the Apple brand, privacy, and iOS 16, there are no fewer than four new features to further expand your privacy protection on iPhone.
Remove specific fields in shared contacts
If you pay close attention to the contact details on your iPhone, you probably have a range of phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, aliases, and other personal details. When you share contacts with others, all this information is shared with them.
To avoid this, open the Contacts app and tap a contact. Scroll down and select “Share Contact”then “Filter Fields”at the top of the sharing screen. You will then see checkboxes next to each piece of information. Uncheck the data you don’t want to share and click Done. When you share this contact, the fields you didn’t check will be removed and the recipient won’t see them. Unfortunately, you will have to perform this operation every time you share from your iPhone.
Best clipboard protection
Applications can no longer automatically access clipboard contents. When you copy something from one application to another, you will always see a window asking if you want to allow the application to access your clipboard.
If you paste something manually, you must give this permission. In the past, rogue apps tried to automatically capture everything that passed through your clipboard. Now you can disable clipboard access for those apps… and uninstall them just to be sure!
The best way to hide your photos
The Photos app in iOS 16 is much better at hiding your photos. You will now need to enter your passcode or use Face ID or Touch ID to open hidden and recently deleted albums in the app. This feature is enabled by default, so you don’t have to do anything to use it.
You can go one step further and completely hide the Hidden album. To do this, go to Settings > Photos and uncheck Show Hidden Album. Your hidden photos will remain on your device, but the album won’t show up in the Photos app.
Perform regular security checks
iOS 16 introduces a feature called Security Check that allows you to quickly view the permissions granted to apps, remove access to shared data, and change your Apple ID password. You can consider this security check as a quick way to protect the data on your iPhone.
This feature is especially useful for those whose security has been compromised or who have so-called “at risk”profiles.