In light of the recent hacking of private celebrity pictures, the focus is once again on how our contacts and private photographs can be exploited by unscrupulous elements.

Now while defending against an all-out hack attack is difficult, there are some things we can do to protect ourselves by achieving the right balance in our smartphone privacy settings.

By granting access to every third party application, we risk giving out our personal information without even having any prior knowledge about it.

The privacy settings pane in iOS acts as a sort of permission firewall giving the user the freedom to decide which third party applications can have access to your contacts and photos. This will be explained below:

Step1 Click on Settings--->Privacy--->Contacts and you will be displayed this window:

Various applications as seen above in the screenshot can be allowed or denied access to your contacts.

Applications like Whatsapp and Viber do not function without access to your contacts list, hence disabling it is not recommended.

Denying access to applications is not a permanent feature and can be re-enabled at any given moment of time.

Step 2 Click on Settings--->Privacy --->Photos:

Step 3 Click on Settings---->Privacy-->Twitter and Settings-->Privacy--->Facebook:

Being aware of your privacy settings on iOS is very essential. This can enable you to have complete control over your privacy and know which applications are requesting access to which respective data.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 21st, 2014