Newer iPhones come with a chip called a motion coprocessor which gathers data from the accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses of the device to precisely measure motion and fitness data such as body motion, step count, stairs climbed, and more. Most people, including yours truly, do appreciate the data collected as it’s particularly helpful if you want to use your iPhone as a step counter and pedometer, for instance. Others are creeped out by this feature.
If you belong to the latter group of people, then I will show you a quick and easy way to stop your iPhone from tracking your steps and other fitness activity.
Your motion and fitness activity is private
Before we move forward, I want to make clear that all the health data collected by your iPhone is in no way shared with anyone, not even Apple. It stays on your device, or if you sometimes perform iCloud backups, it is safely encrypted so no one besides you can access this data.
I feel this is important to highlight, but something tells me that it still won’t be enough to convince privacy freaks. If you’re one of them, or simply if you don’t want your iPhone to keep track of your steps, then here is what to do.
Disabling Motion & Fitness tracking on iPhone
Note these instructions were written for iPhone, but the steps are exactly identical should you want to turn off fitness and motion tracking on your iPad.
1) Go to Settings > Privacy > Motion & Fitness. You will see a list of applications that can access your fitness activity. You may disable apps individually, or just turn off the master switch all together.
2) If you want to disable any kind of activity tracking on your device, simply toggle off the Fitness Tracking button.
And just like that, you stopped your iPhone from counting your steps, and tracking your motion, and more.
Now if you’re really afraid about your privacy, here are other way you can increase it:
- Understanding iOS Location Services and what they do
- How to stop iPhone from tracking your location
- How to keep your iPhone from knowing where you are going next
- How to turn off location-based ads on iPhone and iPad
Out of curiosity, who among you turns off motion and fitness tracking on iOS, and why?