Transparency Cascade Press “In December 2024, the Federal Trade Commission caught a data broker called Mobilewalla holding more than 500 million advertising IDs paired with people’s precise location — and selling the ability to draw a circle around a building and get a list of every phone that had been inside it. The FTC’s own example of what that buys you: a segment of “visitors to pregnancy centers.” Much of that location data came from ordinary phone apps, scooped up through the ad auctions that fire every time an app loads a banner. That same pipeline from your phone, to an ad ID, to a broker, to a buyer; it sells to the government too. A federal agency that isn’t allowed to collect your location without a warrant can simply buy it from a broker who got it from your weather app. The EFF has tracked this exact data reaching Customs and Border Protection. In this transaction you are not the customer. You are the inventory. So “privacy settings” turns out to be the wrong frame. This isn’t about hiding. It’s about cost. Every setting below makes you a little more expensive to surveil — and surveillance, like any other operation, runs on a budget. The goal isn’t to disappear. It’s to make yourself not worth the money.

Here are the five that matter on an iPhone. The most powerful security setting is the power button Before any of the toggles, the most important thing to understand about your iPhone is counterintuitive, and almost nobody is told it: A phone that is turned off is dramatically harder to break into than a phone that is merely locked. Here’s why. When your iPhone has been unlocked even once since it booted up, the keys that decrypt your data are sitting in its memory, ready to go. Forensic tools, the ones police and border agents use, made by companies like Cellebrite, are far better at pulling data off a phone in that “already been unlocked” state. But when a phone is powered all the way off and hasn’t been unlocked since, those keys don’t exist in memory yet. The data is a safe with the door welded shut. Leaked documents from the tool-makers themselves show that a powered-off, up-to-date iPhone is the case they struggle with most. So the single most protective thing you can do, in any moment of real risk (a protest, a border crossing, a traffic stop) is hold the side button and a volume button until the slider appears, and power the phone all the way down. Not lock it. Off. Everything else is settings. This is a habit. The habit matters more…”