Location Services are useful for apps like Google Maps, Waze, and services like Find My. However, when you have it enabled for multiple apps, your shiny new iPhone leaves a gigantic digital footprint everywhere you go. It also sips a bit of battery life when location tracking is unnecessarily running on apps it doesn’t need to.
If you’re worried about your online security, privacy, or even battery life, you can turn off Location Services on your iPhone. There are two ways of going about this: turning off Location Services completely, or for individual apps on a separate basis. The latter is the better idea of the two, as it allows you to fine-tune the experience.
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How to turn off Location Services on your iPhone
Completely disabling Location Services has its fair share of drawbacks. Keep in mind that if you go this route, navigational apps will be pretty useless, apps like DoorDash won’t be able to find your precise location, and Find My security services won’t work properly. If you still want to go through with the process, here’s how it works:
- Open the Settings app from your home page. Scroll down until you find Privacy & Security. Tap it to navigate the menu.
- You’ll see the Location Services option at the very top. Tap it to go to the Location Services menu.
- Disable the green toggle next to Location Services to prevent any location sharing.
Turn off Location Services for specific apps
While turning off Location Services works as intended, it’s a pretty miserable way to live. Who in this day and age doesn’t use Google Maps? Whatever your goal is, you are much better off disabling the feature for specific apps instead.
- Open the Settings app and navigate to Privacy & Security.
- Tap Location Services at the top, the toggle should be green (on).
- The list below will show all the apps on your phone. Scroll down and select an app from the list.
- You’ll see four options to choose from. Each of them provides you with different levels of privacy.
- Never ensures that location sharing for this app is turned off completely.
- Ask Next Time or When I Share will ask you how you want to proceed once you launch the app. Whenever you launch the app in the future, it will give you three options for location permissions: Allow Once, Allow While Using, or Don’t Allow.
- While using the App will permit the app to use your location whenever it’s active. Once the app is closed, this option will prevent the app from using your location in the background. Keep in mind that Apple counts widgets as still “using the app.” If you have the app’s widget on your home screen, it will still be able to use your location.
- Always will allow the app to use your device’s location indefinitely. (Note: not all apps will have this option listed.)
- Simply choose any of the options from this list depending on your preferences, and you’re all set.
- Below these sharing options, you might also notice an option called Precise Location for some apps. If you want to keep using location services but don’t want to share your exact location, toggle it off. This will ensure that only an approximate area of your location is exposed to Apple and the applications.
Optional: Disable Significant Locations
If you’re really concerned about your online privacy or battery life, there’s one more hidden setting you can change, which is related to location permissions. Significant Locations is a feature that keeps track of your most frequent and recently visited places. This helps the Photos app tell you where you took certain photos, and it’s also used in navigational apps to provide predictive traffic routing.
It’s a very helpful feature, but if you do want to turn it off for some reason, here’s where you can find it:
- Go to the Settings app on your iPhone, scroll down, and select Privacy & Security.
- Tap Location Services at the top, and scroll down the list till you find System Services.
- In the System Services menu, scroll down and tap Significant Locations. Disable the green toggle next to the feature on the subsequent screen if you want to turn it off.
Protect Your Privacy
Whatever location permission setting you choose, all of them offer a better layer of protection than keeping location services on indefinitely and across all apps — so make sure you don’t choose Always if you don’t want to always share where you are at. Over the years, Apple has taken numerous steps to ensure that its users feel comfortable about what information is taken from them. So, we recommend you use these privacy features to ease your mind and enjoy the added bonus of extra battery life.
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