The 10 Privacy Settings Every Family Should Change Today

Privacy advice usually arrives as a lecture about deleting your accounts and moving to a cabin. This is not that. Everything below can be done from the sofa, most of it in under two minutes each, and none of it requires giving up anything your family actually uses.

Work through them in order. The first four matter more than the rest combined.

One note before you start. Companies move these settings around, rename them, and occasionally reset them during a major update. The locations below are close, but if a menu has moved, search the app's settings for the name of the feature rather than giving up.

1. Stop apps following you into other apps

This is the single highest value setting on the list. It controls whether an app can watch what you do elsewhere on your phone and across other companies' services.

On iPhone, open Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Tracking, and switch off Allow Apps to Request to Track. That denies every app at once rather than waiting to be asked.

On Android, open Settings, then Privacy, then Ads, and delete or reset your advertising ID. Turning it off entirely is the stronger choice.

2. Turn off ad personalization at the source

Separate from the setting above, the large platforms each keep their own profile of you and use it to target advertising. Each has a switch.

In your Google account, look under Data and privacy for personalized ads. In Meta's Accounts Center, look for ad preferences and the section covering activity from partners. Apple has its own, under Settings, Privacy and Security, Apple Advertising.

Turning these off does not stop you seeing ads. It reduces how much of your family life is used to choose them.

3. Stop handing over your address book

Most messaging and social apps ask to upload your contacts, and most people tap yes during setup without thinking about it.

That upload is how companies build the map of who your family is, and it includes people who never agreed to anything. Your mother's phone number, your child's friend's parents, an old colleague. Once it is uploaded you cannot take it back.

On iPhone, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Contacts, and see the list of apps with access. On Android, look under Settings, Privacy, Permission manager, Contacts. Revoke it for everything that does not strictly need it, which is most things.

4. Set location to "While Using" and turn off the history

Very few apps need to know where your family is when they are closed. A weather app does not need to follow your children to school.

Go through your location permissions and set everything to While Using rather than Always, with the exception of genuine navigation and safety apps. Then find the separate setting that keeps a running history of everywhere you have been. In Google it lives under Location History or Timeline in your account settings, and you can turn it off and delete what is already stored.

5. Give apps a few photos instead of your entire library

When an app asks for photo access, the default request is usually for everything. That includes every picture of your children, every screenshot, and the location and date attached to each one.

Both iPhone and Android now let you grant access to selected photos only. Go into your photo permissions and downgrade anything that does not need the full library, which is nearly everything except a photo editor you actively use.

6. Set your activity history to delete itself

Search and viewing history accumulates for years by default and quietly becomes one of the most revealing records that exists about a household.

In your Google account, under Data and privacy, find Web and App Activity and YouTube History, and set both to auto-delete after three months. You keep the useful recent personalization and stop building a permanent archive of everything anyone in the house has ever looked up.

7. Check the microphone and camera list

This takes ninety seconds and is usually the one that produces a surprised noise.

Open your privacy settings and look at the full list of apps with microphone access, then the list with camera access. Games, shopping apps and old utilities collect these permissions during installation and keep them indefinitely. Revoke anything that has no obvious reason to listen or watch.

8. Review what your voice assistant kept

If you have a smart speaker or use a voice assistant, it has recordings, and in some cases those recordings have historically been reviewed by people to improve the service.

In the assistant's settings, look for the section covering voice and audio recordings. Delete the existing history and turn off the option allowing recordings to be retained or reviewed. If the household has children who talk to it, this one is worth doing today.

9. Turn on encrypted backups

Your messages can be perfectly encrypted in the app and still sit in a readable backup in the cloud.

In WhatsApp, go to Settings, then Chats, then Chat Backup, and switch on the end to end encrypted backup. On Apple, turn on Advanced Data Protection in your account settings, which stops Apple holding a key to your iCloud backup.

One warning on Advanced Data Protection, because it is a real trade off. Once Apple cannot read your data, Apple cannot recover it for you either. Set up the recovery key or a recovery contact when it prompts you, write the key down somewhere physical, and do not skip that step.

10. Decide what is public about your children

The other nine settings are about companies. This one is about everyone else, and for families it may matter most.

Check who can see the accounts where your children appear. Look at whether your posts are visible beyond people you know, whether others can tag your children in photos without approval, and who is actually in the shared albums and family groups you set up years ago. Groups accumulate people quietly, and a shared album created for one holiday may still be visible to someone you have not spoken to since.

Also worth a conversation rather than a setting: agreeing with the other adults in your family about what gets posted publicly at all. That decision is harder to reverse than any of the switches above.

What these settings cannot do

Work through the list and you will have meaningfully reduced how much of your family is collected, sold and retained. It is genuinely worth the hour.

It is worth being precise about what a setting actually is, though. It is a permission you have been granted inside a system somebody else owns. Every switch on that list exists because a company chose to offer it, and the company keeps the master key. It writes the rulebook, and it can rewrite it whenever it likes: change what a setting means, quietly reset it during an update, move it somewhere you will not think to look, or withdraw the option altogether.

Instagram is the example worth remembering. End to end encryption on direct messages was announced as ending in March 2026 and switched off in May. Nobody's privacy settings changed. The rulebook did, and there was no switch anywhere in the app that could have stopped it.

That is the ceiling on all of this. You get to decide how a company treats your family's data right up until the moment it decides otherwise.

The alternative is for the data not to be there in the first place, which is why we built The Ark. It is a small device that lives in your house and holds your family's chats, photos and files on hardware you own, so there is no company in the middle to set terms or change them later. You plug it in, follow a guided setup of about ten minutes, and everyone joins by scanning a code. If you can set up an iPhone, you can set up The Ark.

Either way, do the ten settings this week. They are free, they take about an hour in total, and most families never touch a single one of them.