(upbeat music)
- Hey everybody, David and David here,
from payetteforward.com and upphone.com.
And in this video,
we're going to tell you about,
eight Google pixel settings
you should turn off now.
- And we're gonna accomplish two main goals,
by changing just a few things in a few minutes.
We're gonna save battery life
and we're gonna protect your personal privacy.
Let's dive in.
- Yeah, so everything's going to be in the Settings app,
I'm gonna swipe up from the middle of the screen.
I have Settings in the most recently
used bar at the top,
but you can also just find it down here,
in alphabetical order.
First three settings are all in Privacy,
so I'm gonna tap Privacy.
I'm going to tap Advanced,
and then I'm going to tap Ads advertising.
- Right.
- People, companies love to collect information about you,
to deliver you very targeted ads.
- Right, every time you visit a website,
open an app, an auction runs.
The point of opting out here,
is that we're gonna make you
less valuable to those advertisers.
So, they say that you won't see fewer ads,
but the truth is you might see fewer ads,
because eventually companies will stop bidding on you.
If they don't know that you're valuable.
So, opt out.
- Yeah, well, we're gonna turn that switch on,
and now this setting's turned off.
- But we're gonna turn the setting on,
to turn off ads personalization.
- Exactly.
- "Opt out of interest-based ads?"
Okay.
Well, done.
Next thing we're gonna do
is turn off unnecessary app permissions,
things like camera, contacts, microphone.
Do certain apps actually need to be able to
access these things, on your Google pixel?
- Right.
- Sometimes, Instagram might need
the camera to take pictures.
- Right.
- Your bank doesn't need access to your contacts,
for example
- so I'm gonna tap back,
and I'm going to scroll to Permission Manager.
And for instance, I'll just tap on Camera.
Look through these apps.
Do these apps need access to your camera?
Amazon Shopping, does that need access to my camera?
- Probably not.
So what you can do is,
you can tap on Amazon Shopping,
and just tap Deny or Ask every time.
- This is more of a concern for apps
that may not be as reputable,
as an app made by Amazon.
But sometimes a third-party developer,
might have an app that has access to all your photos,
and they could be sending your photos,
to their servers in the background without your knowledge.
So these settings are important.
- Yep.
The next thing we do is turn off
sending diagnostics and usage data to Google.
This will save a little bit of battery life.
You can also use a little bit of cellular data,
if you're not careful.
- Yep.
- I'm gonna tap back to,
the main privacy page here,
and we are going to scroll down,
to usage and diagnostics.
Right now, the switch is on,
just tap it to turn it off.
- Right, let's keep going.
- Yep, next settings are goin to
be in settings location.
So I'm gonna go back to the main page
of the settings up here.
- Right.
- And I'm gonna scroll down and tap on location.
As you can see four apps
currently have access to my location.
- We're not the type of people that decided
to just turn off location services,
or GPS on your phone completely.
Because that would destroy part of the purpose.
Part of what makes the pixel so great,
is that it knows where you are,
and can use that information.
So we just encourage you to be deliberate,
and be intentional about which apps
you want to allow to use your location.
And then there are some things too,
to watch out for so you don't run
through your battery life all at once.
- Yes, let's tap App access to location.
So allowed all the time,
Google allowed only while in use,
Android Auto, Chrome and YouTube, and denied.
So go through your list of apps,
see which ones have access to your location.
Do you need this app having access to your location ,
when it's in use or all the time.
- Right, and especially pay attention
to the ones that are allowed all the time.
Because that could be accessing your location,
in the background when you're not using the app.
That can run through your battery life,
faster than pretty much anything else,
because GPS takes battery.
- Yeah, so if I tap on Google here allowed all the time,
you gonna set it to deny.
You might also have the option to allow,
using the app or ask every time when you open the app,
so you can decide whether or not
it needs location at that time.
- Hmm
- So we'll go back to the main location settings page,
and tap on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning.
We recommend turning these off.
- Right,these could be big battery drains.
Your phone is constantly looking around
and say like "Is there Wi-Fi here?
Is there Bluetooth here? Is there Wi-fi here?"
Why does it need to do that?
- And it can do that even when Wi-fi and Bluetooth are off.
So even when you're not
connected to Wi-fi networks
or Bluetooth devices, it can still do this.
- Right.
- So we're gonna turn these off.
- Wi-Fi is still gonna work.
Bluetooth is still going to work on your phone,
and you can bear in mind,
that with any of these settings,
they're not permanent.
You could go back if something doesn't work right.
Trust us, it's all gonna work.
- Part of locations that we're gonna talk about,
is Google location history.
Do you want Google saving a detailed list,
of all the places you go with your Google Pixel?
I wouldn't.
- Right.
- I'll go back to the main page of location,
and I'm going to tap Advanced,
and Google location history tap on that.
Go to your Google account location history,
saves where you go with your devices.
Even when you aren't using the specific Google service.
You personalize maps, recommendations based
on places you've visited and more.
I'm just gonna go ahead and turn this off.
If you wanna leave this on,
by all means go ahead.
There's an auto delete option.
Set that to three months.
That way at least you're deleting
the data every three months,
as opposed to every year and a half.
- Right.
- But we're just gonna turn this off entirely.
That's what we'd recommend doing.
- Yeah, you gotta be careful with these recommendations,
and just remember Google is a great company,
but they don't do this out of
the kindness of their heart,
they're recommending things to you.
But people are paying,
to be those recommendations.
So be careful with this stuff.
- Yeah, so just tap that switch next location history,
its just scroll down and make
the pause button actually savable.
- Sounds good.
- Hit that pause, there you go.
- I think the harder it is to turn something off,
the more valuable it is to turn off.
It's like finding these little secrets.
- So we're going to go back to the main page,
of the settings app.
And this one's a pretty big one,
Install Unknown Apps.
Do you want third-party apps,
to be able to install other apps,
on your phone without necessarily your permission?
- Right.
It's like you're having a party,
and you invite somebody over to the party.
That's like installing an app on your phone.
But then you also say to that app or that person,
go ahead and bring as many of your friends
as you want you to the party.
Now, most of the apps are only
gonna invite reputable people or friends,
but some people may bring unsavory characters let's say,
and those are the apps that
you don't wanna have installed.
So it's easier just to turn this off.
- So we'll tap on apps and notifications, tap on advanced,
scroll down to a special app access and tap on that,
and find install unknown apps.
Here you go.
Here's the list of the apps.
So if it says allowed for an app,
that means that app,
can install unknown apps on your Android.
We could recommend probably just setting
these all to not allow.
- Yeah.
If an app really needs it that badly,
it will alert you to the fact that
it needs to have this app installed.
I am not personally aware of any instances,
where this is gonna make an app not work at all.
So just do this to protect your privacy,
because you don't want a whole bunch of unknown apps,
showing up on your phone,
just like you don't want all those unknown people,
showing up at your house for the party.
- Last thing we're gonna talk about is,
preferred network type.
5g is becoming more widely available.
And on some pixel phones,
the default preferred network type is 5g.
However, it's not available everywhere.
You might live in an area with poor 5g coverage.
And if you have your 5g network preferred,
might have some issues.
- Right.
Especially battery life issues.
To be fair, the Google pixel 5 and the 4a 5g,
are two of the most battery efficient
5g phones that are out there.
But as David said,
if you don't have a good signal,
or good connection to the 5g network,
it's gonna burn through your battery
trying to stay connected.
Maybe have perfect 4g LTE coverage,
which if you don't have a good 5g signal,
it's gonna be faster anyway.
- Yeah, let's go back to the main page of the settings app,
and we're gonna tap on network and internet,
we're going to tap on mobile network,
and we're gonna tap on preferred network type
right now is 5g recommended.
There's not a lot of good 5g coverage,
in our area specifically either.
So this is what we're certain ,
we'd wanna turn off on this phone.
- Right.
- We're gonna set the LTE, and there we go.
Those are eight Google pixel settings.
You should turn off now.
Thanks for watching this video.
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