No, your iPhone’s journaling app isn’t sharing personal info with strangers

If you’ve been on Facebook or TikTok recently you might have seen a warning, filled with scary icons and rhetoric, about a new iPhone setting that shares your name and location. Like most viral warnings about the iPhone, it’s not true.

Before we explain why it’s nothing to worry about, here’s how to turn off the setting:

Go to the Settings app

Open the Privacy & Security tab

Scroll down to Journaling Suggestions and tap it

Toggle the Discoverable by Others option to off

OK, now that you’re completely safe, let’s review what this setting does and why your data and location aren’t at risk. The feature is tied to Apple’s new Journal app that arrived in iOS 17.2. Like most stock apps, it automatically appears on your iPhone when you install the update. However, even if you delete the app, the setting remains since it works across third-party journaling apps as well via a new Journaling Suggestions framework.

The feature employs a picker to give users ideas for their journal entries. As Apple explains, “When someone chooses a suggestion from the picker, the system makes high-level details about the event available to your app. For example, a journaling app uses the details to display the beginning of a new journal entry about the selected suggestion.”

The Discoverable by Others toggle is designed to help friends and family prioritize important events for journaling by targeting ones that people they know were at. By making yourself discoverable to other iPhones, the features will suggest entries for personal events throughout a week, such as “a place they visited, a person they connected with, a photo in their library, or a song that they play repeatedly.”

The setting uses Bluetooth to detect devices belonging to people you know so they need to be pretty close to you, but it doesn’t identify exactly which people they are. So Journaling Suggestions may detect that four people in your contacts were together for a few hours at a specific place with dozens of other people and deduce that it’s likely to be a gathering. Then, the next time you open your journaling app of choice, it’ll prompt you to write about the event.

As with most features, this information is stored on the device and is not shared with Apple. No one near you will “know your FULL NAME and EXACTLY where you’re geo located” as the warning claims. It’s just a friendly feature to help you record your memories and as we said at the top, can be easily turned off.

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