You Should Be Able to Find Them. Advertisers Should Not.

You want to know your child got to school.

You do not want an advertising company to know the same thing.

Those two goals sound similar and they are completely different.

Here is how to keep one and switch off the other.

Can I see where my child is?

Yes, and this is the one bit of location sharing worth keeping on.

Use Find My on iPhone, or Family Link on Android, and share their location with you.

That way you can always see where they are.

Just as important, turn location sharing to friends off.

Their location goes to you, not broadcast to a friends list or to an app.

Apps are where the quiet leaking happens.

Set app location access to "While Using" only, because no app needs a child's location twenty-four hours a day.

Never choose "Always".

Then go through the other permissions and grant only what is genuinely needed.

Does that game really need the microphone?

If not, deny it, and the game will work perfectly well anyway.

The same goes for camera and contacts.

Because it quietly builds a profile of your child in the background.

Turning it off takes seconds.

On iPhone, turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track".

On Android, delete the advertising ID.

Nothing breaks, and the apps carry on working exactly as before.

They simply stop stitching together a picture of a child who never agreed to any of it.

Set any Instagram, Snapchat or similar account to private, so only approved friends can see it.

A public account on a child's phone is an open door to strangers.

Private is the default you want from day one, before there is a following to argue about.

The principle underneath all of this is short.

You can see them, the data-harvesting machine cannot.

A child does not need to be tracked, profiled and advertised to.

Switch all of it off, and keep the one bit of location that actually matters.