The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but notice the similarities between our smartphones and the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. The bearer of the One Ring adores it and finds it a gargantuan task to part ways with it. Similarly, our smartphones are dear and precious to us; so much so we often take it along even during our brief trips to the toilet.

In addition, the One Ring endows the wearer with the power of invisibility and the ability to control the other rings of power. Similarly, our smartphones endow us with considerable power by bringing the world into the palm of our hands and allow us to communicate with people at lightspeed.

But indulge in it too much and we become a Gollum-like creature – a fidgety, focus-shattered, smartphone-addict constantly looking for the next dopamine hit.

Most importantly, just like the One Ring, our smartphones don’t consider us their masters. The One Ring yearns for and only swears allegiance to its maker and master, Sauron. Similarly, our smartphones’ allegiance lies with their makers and masters – the Google, Facebook, Huawei and Tencents of the world.

The reason for this is simple. Facebook and Google’s core product is free. And therein lies the catch. If you’re getting something for free, you can be sure that you’re not the customer. Rather, you’re the product.

Their paymasters, and hence customers, are the myriad advertisers who pay increasingly heftier amounts to be able to crank up their mindshare in your evermore fractured attentional landscape.

In my previous article, I discussed a major ramification of this misplacement of allegiance – our smartphones sending data about our private lives, words and actions to their corporate masters.

Now, let’s look at how we can start to dictate the amount and kinds of personal information that these corporations have access to.

Tweak your app permissions

A first step that goes a long way towards wrestling back some control of your private data is tweaking your app permissions on your smartphone. If you’re an iPhone user, go to your iOS Settings and click on Privacy. If you’re an Android user, click on the Settings icon and then scroll down till you find the Apps section.

Here, you’ll see a list of all the apps installed on your phone. You can grant or deny each app access to your camera, contacts, microphone, storage, location and telephone. You’d be surprised to find that many apps which don’t need access to much of the data are nevertheless set up to collect it.

Go through the entire list of apps on your phone and grant or deny access as you see fit. To err on the side of caution, it’s best to revoke access initially and then if the app indicates that it requires specific permissions to be enabled for it to function as needed, then you can always turn it on later.

While you’re at it, another good practice is to perform periodic app spring cleaning. Every six months or so, you should go through your list of apps and delete all the ones that you don’t or rarely use.

If needed, you can always redownload them later but just having them on your phone means it could be harvesting your data and tracking your online whereabouts without your knowledge, in addition to taking up unnecessary phone storage.

Tweak your Google settings

In addition to your app settings, your Google settings also need to be adjusted so it reflects your privacy preferences. To do this, click on the Settings icon and go to Google settings. Here, click on the Data and Personalisation tab and scroll down to Ad personalisation. You can turn this off to ensure Google isn’t collecting and using your data to pummel you with targeted ads.

You should also check which of your apps or third-party services have access to parts of your Google account’s data. To do this, go to your Google permissions page and look through the list of services that use the data that Google has on you. See a service that looks suspect or one that you don’t use anymore? Just click on the blue Remove Access button to stop it from being able to utilise your Google data.

Tweak your off-Facebook activity settings

No conversation about online privacy is complete without a lengthy discussion about Facebook and its suite of popular apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

The most potentially nefarious aspect of Facebook’s extensive data collection is how it tracks your off-Facebook activity. For some background, many companies and organisations embed Facebook’s business tools on their websites and apps. This conveys your browsing and purchase data to Facebook, using which it provides you with targeted, personalised ads.

This means that Facebook knows not just about what you do while you’re on Facebook but most of what you do off-Facebook as well. This is way too much information and power for any one organisation to wield – least of all Facebook, which as the Cambridge Analytica scandal amply demonstrated, is not as careful with its treasure trove of user data as it should be.

For example, let’s say that you go on Nike’s website and purchase a new pair of sports shoes. If Nike has Facebook’s analytics tool embedded in its website, it could relay both your purchase and browsing data to Facebook. This data, especially when coupled with the avalanche of similar data that other websites supply it with, would help it generate an eerily accurate picture of you.

And thanks to its machine learning algorithms, I can bet that it would be even better at predicting what you would do next or what your next purchase would be than even your significant other or your closest friends.

Imagine that. A faceless corporation that you have little affinity for now knows many aspects of you more intimately than even your loved ones do.

To reverse this, you can go on to the Facebook app and click on the icon with the three horizontal lines on the top right corner. Scroll down and click on Settings & Privacy. Then, click on Settings in the drop down menu. Scroll down and click on Off-Facebook activity when you see it.

Here, you can clear all the data Facebook has collected from the many websites you visited by clicking on Clear history. More importantly, you can manage the data it collects in the future. If you would only like some websites to collect your data and not others, you can click on Manage your off-Facebook activity.

Here, you’ll be shown a list of all the websites and apps that are feeding your information to Facebook. If you see a website or app that you wouldn’t want sending data to Facebook, just click on it and on the following page, click on Turn off future activity from (the specific app or website).

Alternatively, if you would prefer that no websites send your data to Facebook, you could go back to the Off-Facebook activity page and click on More options at the bottom and select Manage Future Activity. Here, toggle off Future off-Facebook activity.

Even though there are many more things that you can do, the basic steps detailed here would go a long way towards protecting your online privacy and taking back your rightful control over your private data.

The writer can be contacted at [email protected].

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.