Messy Privacy Recommendations, Courtesy of Mashable

I think this Mashable writer was probably trying to do something positive, but his article sucks. 7 iPhone Privacy Settings You Should Enable Now is an absolute mess, and it’s clear that he doesn’t know enough about iOS as a platform to be making recommendations on how you manage your privacy settings. Some of his suggestions are good, but the majority are either insufficiently mild or far too extreme. For example, yes, some weather apps are abusing the “always allow” location permission setting, but changing it to “never,” as he suggests, would mean that you’re not going to get any weather notifications. At the same time, he turned off microphone access for Facebook, but left it turned on for all of his Google apps and Instagram, which are some of the biggest privacy offenders. His recommendation of turning off Live Photos, as if the 1.5 second snippet of video is causing a privacy debacle, is absurd; if it really bothers you, you can disable the “live” aspect of an individual photo after it’s taken, there’s no need to abandon a great feature that adds a delightful amount of context to your photos. 

This whole piece is disturbingly inconsistent, and that’s the opposite of what we need when trying to address the avalanche of privacy issues we face today. People who write articles like this have a responsibility to do a lot more research before publishing an article that could influence tens of thousands of people.