While
we recommend you only take selfies decked head-to-toe in performance
gear while you're standing on top of something that was very difficult
to climb (Mount Everest and Rio's "Christ the Reedmer" come to mind), your pictures and your state of dress in said pictures is your business. But as various celebrity phone hacks and at least one Cameron Diaz film have
proven in recent years, it doesn't always stay that way if you're not
careful. Here are a few quick and easy tips for keeping photos and
videos off the Internet and out of strange hands.
1. Turn off your Photo Stream
Rather
than than having to turn on the Photo Stream feature, which
automatically uploads your 1,000 most recent iPhone photos to the iCloud
anytime you connect to WiFi, you instead have to disable the function
to protect your photos and other data from being stored. This is likely
is done for your convenience, and is great should you leave your phone
in the back of a cab some day, but things that you may not want to keep
for one reason or another live there without your knowledge, and with
only passive permission.
To
disable this function on an iPhone, simply open your Settings, select
the iCloud button (way down in the fourth set of menus), then select the
Photos menu and unclick "My Photo Stream" and "Photo Sharing." Your
iPhone will warn you that this setting will delete all of your pictures
from the Photo Stream, but don't worry, those shots of your niece and
nephew are safe on your phone's hard drive in the camera roll. This
setting only removes your phone's ability to save your photos out in the
ether where they can be found and stolen.
But
remember, even when photos are deleted from your camera roll, they can
and often do still exist on your iCloud, unless you remove them
manually. So...
2. Delete Your Back Up
If
you've owned your phone for a while, the five gigs of free storage on
your iCloud is likely full of photos, videos, podcasts, contacts, and
whatever else you might have done recently despite you never
purposefully uploading anything at all. Again, this is great if you ever
lose or break your phone, but if you want to make sure that
your personal photos or information don't exist anywhere but on your
physical device, open up your Settings, click on the iCloud tab again,
scroll down to Storage & Back Up, and turn off your iCloud backup.
Then, continue scrolling down and click on Manage Storage. Here, you can
determine which data you want saved on your iCloud, or you can delete
any or all of your backed up files.
3. Lock Your Phone and Set Many Passwords
Your
iCloud should be protected by a difficult, case-sensitive password no
one else has access to that uses letters, numbers, and symbols, and your
phone should always be locked with a difficult pin and/or your finger
print identification when it's not sitting in your hand. If done
correctly, a lost phone reported immediately to your service provider
will effectively become a very expensive paperweight for the next person
who happens to find it.
Follow
these simple rules and you should be able to take any photos you want.
Even if it's just a picture of your most recent meal that absolutely no
one wants to see.
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