How to Review App Permissions on Your iPhone

Permissions accumulate. You granted something two years ago for one feature, and it has been available to that app ever since. A periodic review takes twenty minutes and usually turns up several things worth revoking.

Start with the Privacy Report

Settings › Privacy & Security › App Privacy Report. Turn it on and leave it for a week.

It then shows which apps actually used each permission, how often, and which domains they contacted. This is more useful than the permission list itself, because it shows behaviour rather than capability — an app with location access that never uses it is different from one checking your position hourly.

Go permission by permission

Settings › Privacy & Security lists each permission type with the apps that hold it. Working down this list is faster than going app by app.

Location Services

The one most worth auditing. For each app you have four choices:

• Never — the default worth aiming for.
• Ask Next Time — useful when you are unsure.
• While Using the App — right for maps and anything genuinely location-based.
• Always — background access. Very few apps have a legitimate need for this.

Also turn off Precise Location for apps that only need a rough area — a weather app does not need your position to the metre.

Then scroll to the bottom of Location Services and open System Services. Most of these are worth leaving alone, but *Significant Locations* keeps a detailed history of places you visit. It is encrypted and stays on-device, but many people are surprised it exists and choose to clear and disable it.

Photos

iOS offers Limited Access, where you pick specific photos and the app sees only those. This is the correct setting for most apps that occasionally need an image — a social app does not need your entire library to let you post one picture.

Review which apps hold Full Access and downgrade the ones that do not need it.

Contacts

Ask why each app has it. Contact access exports your entire address book — everyone else's names, numbers and email addresses. Those people did not consent to that.

This is worth being strict about, because it is the one permission where you are giving away other people's data rather than your own.

Microphone and Camera

Check the list and revoke anything unexpected. iOS shows an orange dot when the microphone is in use and a green dot for the camera — if you see one during an app that should not be recording, investigate.

Tracking

Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking. Turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track and no app can ask again; existing permissions are revoked.

This controls access to your device's advertising identifier, which is what links your activity across different companies' apps. It is one of the higher-value switches on the phone.

A few settings outside the privacy menu

• Settings › Apps › Safari › Hide IP Address — limits what trackers can infer from your address.
• Settings › [your name] › iCloud — check which apps are syncing data you did not intend to sync.
• Settings › Notifications — apps showing full message previews on a locked screen are a privacy leak to anyone who can see the phone.
• Settings › Face ID & Passcode, scroll to *Allow Access When Locked* — decide what is reachable without unlocking.

If you revoke something and an app breaks

That is informative. An app that genuinely needs a permission will prompt you again with a reason. An app that silently stops working without explaining why is telling you something about how it was built.

Reducing what apps can reach is one half of the picture. The other half is what you deliberately keep private — see how to hide photos on an iPhone for that side of it.