Quick ‘safety check’ feature all iPhone users should know about has a super important purpose
This brilliant feature can help you take control of your data.
We're all so used to sharing photo albums, folders, files and more using our iPhones that it can sometimes be a little easy to forget just who has access to what.
In fact, it can be tempting to just give someone access to a whole bunch of things for some short-term convenience, without really thinking about what that might mean in the long-run.
Thankfully, with iOS 16 Apple introduced a really nifty new feature that lets you easily and quickly review who you're sharing data with (and what apps are asking for more) so that you can clamp things down and make sure only you have access to your files, photos and private data.
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The feature is called Safety Check, and it's really easy to access if you're on an iPhone running iOS 16 or later.
It's a really impressive walkthrough a bunch of safety checks, starting by reviewing what you're sharing with any contacts.
This might mean shared albums or files, and you can see a list of all the contacts who currently have access to something on your account. You can revoke this access on a case-by-case basis, or from all of them at once if it's easier.
Then you'll tap through and see a list of all the apps on your iPhone, and what services they have access to, including your location, your photos, your microphone and more.
Again, you can either blanket remove all permissions from all of them, or go through the list and choose one-by-one.
Next, you'll get the chance to turn on Private Relay, Apple's way of scrambling your location data a little while you browse the web, before you review any devices connected to your Apple ID.
This, again, might flag up a device that you actually no longer use, and you can easily remove any devices you like to revoke their access.
Finally, you'll get to review your emergency contact and your own phone number to make sure they're both correct, and then change your Apple ID password or iPhone passcode if you'd like to do either for the sake of keeping things fresh.
That ends the Safety Check, and you'll almost certainly come out of it knowing a lot more about your data than you did when you started, which is exactly what Apple says it's aiming for.
To access Safety Check for yourself, just head to Settings then Privacy & Security, then tap on Safety Check to get started.
If you can't see the option, chances are you might need to update your phone's software to get onto iOS 16, since that was the version of iOS which brought Safety Check with it.