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Facebook has been one of the loudest voices against Apple’s initiative, known as App Tracking Transparency, even taking out full-page ads in major newspapers claiming that Apple is hurting small businesses and threatening the “free and open internet.” 

The other side of the story is the effort developers and digital advertisers have put into trying to get users to allow their data to be collected. Apple allows apps to request permission to track a user’s activity and apps are allowed to collect first-party data or data about how a user interacts with a developer’s own sites. 

For example, Facebook can still track you across Instagram, since both are owned by Meta, which is the name the company gave itself because it realized that Facebook might be a bit of a tarnished brand. But, if it wants to track what you do online, it has to ask. 

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Gmail is a powerhouse of an email app, and its strengths go way beyond sending and receiving messages. The platform also allows you to bring in several of Google’s other apps to join the party from right inside the Gmail interface, giving you quick and easy access to your calendars, to-do list, files, and notes.

Google Chat and Google Meet

If you want, you can have Google Chat and Google Meet open right alongside Gmail on the web. To do this, click the cog icon (top right), then See all settings, and Chat and Meet. Select Google Chat next to Chat to show your text conversations, and Show the Meet section in the main menu next to Meet to see quick links to starting and joining a video call inside your browser.

Drag the top or bottom edges of the Chat and Meet panels on the left sidebar to alter their size and arrange them as you want on screen. It can also be useful to keep your most important contacts near the top of the list—do it by clicking the three dots next to a name and choosing.

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 Gmail can do much more than manage your messages. Justin Morgan / Unsplash

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Photo: Sarah Kobos

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Kasia Bojanowska

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You likely use your Android phone’s web browser every day to look up everything, and as a result, it may be filled with data accumulated when you browse the internet. This data serves a few different functions, typically filing your web browser’s cache and cookies. It can help improve how quickly your browser loads by saving assets from websites you frequently visit as well as saving preferences, such as letting you stay logged in to websites.

However, cookies can also be used by websites to track your browsing history, often with the intention of serving personalized advertising nearly everywhere you go. (I’ve recently been seeing ads for eyeglasses after visiting a few online stores to compare prices and styles.)

Plus, the larger your browser’s cache, the more bloated your browser app becomes with data from websites you might not even be visiting anymore — and yet some of their assets and possibly a few tracking cookies could be sitting in there.

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Every so often, it’s good practice to clear the cache of your phone’s web browser and remove cookies. Pictured here is the Galaxy S21.

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While we can’t predict what 2022 will have in store, you can get your year off to a slightly better start by performing a digital detox on your smartphone by deleting apps that are no longer working for you.

Everybody’s wants and needs are different, so it’s possible that you’ll decide to keep some of the apps I mention below. Even so, it’s a useful year-end exercise to step through all the apps on your phone and ponder whether each one deserves a spot there. Here are some types of apps you might conclude have more downside than benefits:

Messaging apps that could be more private

Let’s start with the easy ones. Messaging apps are among the most-used apps on any smartphone. But many of them don’t provide you as much privacy as they could. Skype, for example, is still one of the few major messaging apps that doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default.

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