Apple’s iOS 16 has been out for just over a month, including a bunch of amazing new features for your iPhone. One of the best of these, in my opinion, is Safety Check.
The headlines have so far touted iOS 16’s Safety Check as a privacy feature that can help prevent abusive partners from accessing your iPhone.
While that’s great, Safety Check also has a more broad appeal—the new iOS 16 feature can be used by anyone to quickly check which iPhone apps have access to various permissions. Safety Check also allows you to quickly revoke any permissions you don’t want or need.
Here’s how to perform a quick Safety Check on your iPhone using iOS 16.
Update to iOS 16
First things first—you do have to update to iOS 16 in order to be able to use this feature. If you are still on iOS 15.7, which you should be for security, go to your iPhone Settings and download the latest version—iOS 16.0.2 at the time of writing. You can always save this article for later if you are not ready to upgrade to iOS 16 yet.
Once you have updated your iPhone to iOS 16, go to your Settings > Privacy and Security and scroll down to Safety Check. Once you are in Safety Check, go to Manage Sharing and access and authenticate yourself using Face ID. You can then review people and apps who have access to your data, as well as boost your security.
The first step in iOS 16’s Safety Check is to review sharing in Apple’s Find My, Health, Photos, Notes, Calendar and Home. If there’s nothing to see here—as there was in my case—move on to step two, which outlines which iPhone apps have access to what.
The first step in iOS 16’s Safety Check is to review sharing in Apple’s Find My, Health, Photos, … [+]
Apple iPhone
Use Safety Check to review iPhone app permissions
Some apps will need access to certain permissions—a map app will need access to your location while you are using it. But that same iPhone app doesn’t need access to your camera, and you can revoke that permission in Safety Check if you need to.
Some apps will need access to certain permissions—a map app will need access to your location while … [+]
Apple iPhone
The next step in iOS 16’s Safety Check is to review Information Access, where you can select the information you no longer want available to access—for example a shopping app shouldn’t need to access your microphone.
Use iOS 16’s Safety Check to review iPhone security
Then it’s time to use Safety Check to review your iPhone’s security. Using the iOS 16 feature, you can see which devices are currently signed in with your Apple ID and revoke them if required. You can then add a trusted phone number to protect your account.
Lastly, you can use iOS 16’s Safety Check to update your password and add emergency contacts, as well as change your device passcode if you need to.
Apple’s Safety Check is easy to use and quick and available to all users of iOS 16. What are you waiting for? Go ahead and try it out.
