Little known iPhone trick can stop people from being able to snoop through your phone

If you've ever handed your phone to someone to show them a photo or a video, only to watch them casually swipe into your messages while you're mid-sentence, you'll know the particular flavour of panic that follows.

Turns out there's a way to stop it happening altogether, and people online are only just cottoning on to it.

The feature has been sitting inside Iphone's settings for years, and once you know it's there, its hard to imaging handing your phone to anyone without it.

Guided access can restrict users to one app on your iphone. (Getty stock image)

How do I stop someone going through my Iphone?

The feature in question is called guided access, and while it's become a handy way of shutting down snoopers, that's not actually why Apple built it into the phone's software.

It was originally designed to be a kind of child lock, letting parents hand their phone to a kid without worrying what apps they might wander into.

Somewhere along the way, people realised it works just as well on nosy friends, partners and colleagues.

Once switched on, Guided Access locks the phone into a single app.

So whoever you've handed it to can look at exactly what you've shown them, and nothing else.

Despite the privacy gains, it's not something you'd want to keep on at all times because it disables crash detection and emergency calls (Getty stock image)

What is Guided Access on iPhone and how do you turn it on

Setting it up takes a couple of minutes. Head to Settings, tap Accessibility, then find Guided Access and switch it on.

From there, you'll be asked to set up how you want to end a session once it's started, either with a passcode or Face ID.

Whichever you choose, entering it again is what unlocks the phone back to normal.

To actually start a session, you can either ask Siri directly, or use the shortcut button that appears in the Control Centre once the feature is switched on.

Depending on your phone, it shows up as a padlock inside a circle or a square, and looks fairly similar to the existing screen rotation lock icon.

There are plenty of other tweaks available within the feature too, including restricting touch input on parts of the screen or disabling the volume buttons, but the basics alone are enough to stop any accidental (or not so accidental) scrolling.

There is one important catch worth knowing before you rely on it, though. While a session is active, features like Crash Detection and emergency calling are switched off, so it isn't something you'd want left running if you're the one holding onto the phone rather than someone else.