What Settings to Look For in Apps

Wall Street Journal

Smartphone applications are passing along a trove of data to marketing companies, a study by The Wall Street Journal has found. There isn’t much consumers can do about it — there’s no way to block or detect much of the tracking technology used by apps on mobile devices.

The most important thing a user can do is pay attention to the information each app is requesting.

Apple Inc.’s iPhones generally request users’ permission before apps can access the phone’s location information. iPhone users can block the phone from sending location data by going to “settings” and “general.”

People who have iOS 4, Apple’s latest operating system for mobile devices, also can block an individual app’s access to location by clicking on “location settings” and scrolling down the list of apps. Programs that transmitted location data in the past 24 hours will be marked with a little arrow on that list.

(More here.)