How to do a Safety Check on Your iPhone
Parents can use Safety Check to check who you’re sharing information with, restrict Messages and FaceTime to your iPhone, reset system privacy permissions for apps, change your passcode, change your Apple ID password, and more.
I’m back today after Spring Break to chat about the Safety Check tool on iPhones. We are exclusively iPhone users in our house, including our daughter's “down-cycled” device. The Safety Check feature is a little-known tool that parents and kids can both benefit from. Let’s jump into how to do a safety check-up on your iPhone.
What is Safety Check?
The safety check feature on iPhone allows you to go through a relatively simple three-step process to review three critical things:
Who you are sharing things with. This includes things like devices/people that have access to your location or even shared photo albums and notes.
What data apps have access to. You can see which apps can access your location, camera, microphone, local network, photos, contacts, and other critical privacy-related functionalities – including health data! I believe this step has the most significant value of the safety check for our purposes (internet safety for families and kids).
Which devices you are currently signed into. It might surprise you to see the list! Your Apple ID should only be signed in on devices you can access.
I want to acknowledge that the official documentation on Safety Check makes it clear that this feature is designed with people in distress in mind. There are serious interpersonal, familial, and legal situations in which individuals need to remove access quickly, and the Safety Check feature allows for that. This is why you will see a “Quick Exit” link on every page.
That said, the tool provides a quick way for parents to ensure digital safety for kids of all ages that use iPhones. In summary, you can use Safety Check to check who you’re sharing information with, restrict Messages and FaceTime to your iPhone, reset system privacy permissions for apps, change your passcode, and change your Apple ID password.
How to find Safety Check
Most folks don’t utilize Safety Check because they don’t even know it exists! It’s a little buried in the Apple settings. You need to navigate to Settings> Privacy & Security > Safety Check.
Once you click on Safety Check, you’ll navigate through three simple steps described below. Disclaimer: The Safety Check main screen also allows you to do an Emergency Reset of all access. The Emergency Reset option is not the primary reason I’m suggesting this check-up, but if you or your kids just need to go back to square one, this is a quick and easy path. You’ll just need to deal with apps prompting you a lot to let you access things.
Step One: Sharing with People
You don’t realize how many people you’ve shared photos, notes, and other access with until you see this list! Wow, it can be long! My best suggestion is to tackle this twice. First, focus on the “easy” things like photo and note sharing. This list is often harmless photo album shares with family and friends over the years. Unless you have concerns about these folks now having access, you can mostly peruse this list to make sure nothing jumps out and move on.
Second, I suggest slowing down and looking through the list with a sharper eye for who has “Find My” access. “Find My” is a great feature that lets you and others track your (often many) devices. Speaking as someone who lost their phone in a hotel once, this feature is amazing. As a parent, I always know where my daughter’s iPhone is. It does, however, give someone very exact information about the location of your devices and, as a result, you.
Sometimes we intend to give temporary access to someone and forget to take it away – maybe your tween or teen goes on a trip with another family, and you provide access to “Find My” on their devices. The Safety Check process gives you the opportunity to make sure “Find My” is only available to the smallest number of people possible.
Step Two: App Access
In my opinion, this is the most valuable part of Safety Check – but it’s also what will take the most time, especially if you or your child use many apps. You will see a list of every app on your phone and what data they have access to. What I like about Step 2 is that you can view the information in two ways: toggle between (1) a list of apps and (2) a list of information access. You only need to review once, so it’s your preference how you attack this.
Many of us are guilty of installing apps and quickly clicking through the little dialog boxes that have us agree to various access: tracking across apps, health data, calendars, contact lists, etc. While many are savvier now than even a few years ago, if you’ve had an app for a while, you might not realize how much access it has. Take your time going through this list and carefully consider what an app really needs for you to benefit from it.
When I did my first Safety Check, a lot of apps have/had access to my microphone that simply did not need it. Same goes for calendar access. Cleaning up this access list has made me feel better about having so much of my life on my phone.
Step Three: Review account security
This step lets you see which devices are signed in with your Apple ID. This might seem small, but let me ask: have you ever stayed in an AirBnB and noticed the TV signed in to someone else’s Apple TV or Netflix who is not the house owner? Of course, you have! Signing out of devices is something that a lot of us are lazy about. This step helps you confirm that only devices you can access utilize your Apple credentials. I would go a step further and say if there are devices you don’t use often, consider signing them out and only signing in when and if you need to. This is a reasonable security precaution.
In Summary
I suggest doing a Safety Check twice a year. It’s an excellent opportunity to see how your child (and you!) shares information and access to data. I find it most helpful for tweens and teens to see which apps they’ve given camera and microphone access to. Social media apps are famous for asking for and often receiving significant access.
As with much of my Parent Tech advice, I’ll end by saying that a Safety Check is an excellent opportunity to talk with your child about digital hygiene in general. What apps do they regularly use? What can they delete? Once you sort through that, discuss what access the apps they use really need. In my experience, you can have thoughtful and engaging conversations with kids of all ages on these topics.
If you prefer to watch video tutorials, Apple has a video to walk you through the steps we’ve discussed today.