Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices
Quick-fire questions
How to ensure apps and sites aren’t tracking me?
> To check which apps are allowed to track, look in Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking. Preventing websites from tracking requires you to use either a VPN service, or an iCloud+ account with Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Private Relay turned on.
How to use a Dvorak keyboard on my iPhone?
> Most keyboards offer a choice of several different layouts in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > [keyboard name], which might well include Dvorak, French AZERTY and central European QWERTZ in addition to the standard QWERTY. These are most helpful when you normally work in a different language with its own non-QWERTY layout.
Standard or Advanced Data Protection?
Q Should I enable iCloud’s new Advanced Data Protection?
A For most this comes down to whether its additional protection is useful, whether you want Apple to be able to recover your data should you lose access to your iCloud account, and how difficult it’ll be to switch all your Apple devices and Macs to this new service.
With the standard protection offered by iCloud and iCloud+, all the more private data is already fully protected using end-to-end encryption. This includes your Keychain with all your passwords, health data, cards and payment information. Advanced Data Protection adds backups, Photos, Notes, the contents of your iCloud Drive and some other categories. The big difference here is that Apple holds the encryption keys for those unless you opt for this additional protection.
The benefit in Apple keeping your keys is that, should you lose access to your account, it can recover the data for you. With end-to-end encryption in the advanced option, only you have those keys, and you’d need to recover data using a contact or personal recovery key, or a device passcode.
The major obstacle for most users is that Advanced Data Protection is all or nothing; if you still have devices or Macs running iOS or iPadOS 16.1 or earlier, or macOS 13.0 or earlier, then you won’t be able to convert your account to the advanced version. Even if that device hasn’t been active for years, if it’s still listed among those against your Apple ID, conversion will fail. Apple’s detailed information is at apple.co/3IgI0fR.
Switch to Advanced Data Protection only if you need its benefits and all your devices are compatible.