Have you ever thought about privacy while giving access to the app makers about your contact list, camera, recording, location, calls on your android phone? Or the issue of security and privacy doesn’t matter anymore, especially in the virtual world.
According to CyberNews, apps in the health and fitness, communications, and productivity sections require the highest number of dangerous permissions on average.
The most popular requirement of 99% of top android apps is to gain full network access and to view network connections, which permits an app to connect to the Internet, while 72% of apps asked for permission to view wifi connections.
Nearly, 75% of apps ask to read external storage and modify or delete external storage. On the other hand, 36% of apps ask for permission to use your camera such as photography, parenting, dating, etc. Surprisingly, the apps in the categories of gaming, astrology, and personalization also ask for camera permissions.
Have you guessed the percentage of apps that record your conversations? If not, then the answer is 21%. Yes, out of the top 1020 Android apps nearly 215 asks for microphone access especially the apps in the categories of finance, lifestyle, and wallpapers.
When it comes to calling, nearly 80 apps out of 1020 Android applications ask for permission to make direct calls. Luckily, most of these apps were from categories like communication, business, and social media. The interesting part is that even apps from the categories of gaming, photography, and wallpapers require access to your contact list. However, you should think twice about giving contact-related access to apps that do not need to use such information.
“It goes without saying that apps from any category might ask for dangerous permissions. For example, you’d expect a communication app to ask for access to your phone book and Android accounts, while a navigation app wouldn’t raise any eyebrows by asking to track your location,” says Vincentas Baubonis, CyberNews security researcher who analyzed the data.
Four basic steps to minimize the risk
• Only permit those apps that make sense. For example, if you give apps access to your microphone, they may be listening in, so be aware of what you’re giving them access to.
• Try to download an app with all permissions disabled, you can still turn on the ones you want individually in the settings.
• Try to download your apps from the Google play store because it identifies the apps that are potentially dangerous.
• Turn off your location settings because a large amount of tracking comes from your location settings.