Check if your phone apps have too many permissions

If you are like me, you might have many apps installed on your phone (my iPhone says I have 209 apps right now). If you have not done so for a while, it is a good idea to periodically review your installed app permissions. We all might have clicked on things and allowed “too much access” to different apps.

Note: I am sharing Apple iOS screenshots below – but please check your Android phones for similar settings also (see Summary below).

The problem

When we install apps, we might get those “This app needs access to X or Y” popups. Seeing that sometimes we add apps exactly when we need them, we might not carefully check all the access that we are granting. But continuous access to “too many things” can be a long-term privacy risk.

Where to look

On an Apple iOS device, the place where you want to go is Settings > Privacy & Security:

There are many things here to check and it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Let’s visit the areas that I’d consider most critical:

Location Services

Let’s check this first. You should tap into each of those apps and consider:

• Should this application be able to track your location at all?
• How often / when should it know your location? Always? When you use it only?
• How “precise” should this location be tracked with this app?

As you can tell, different apps can have different levels of tracking permissions assigned to them:

As you can see in the above screenshot, I set some apps to know my location While using the app only. This makes sense for apps like let’s say banking apps; a banking app might provide functionality to show you the closest banking or ATM location. But I never care about this information unless I use this specific app, so it does not get to Always track my location. Also, depending on the app, I am OK with “approximate” location accuracy vs “precise location”:

I set many apps on my phone to Never as far as my location tracking.

If I do not care to get anything location specific from the app, the app does not need permission to track me (even if it asks for this permission).

The Always permission is reserved for very few apps, like for example weather related apps that I want to get notifications from in case of inclement weather. If I want the app to know where I am so it can give me relevant alerts, then I consider allowing Always.

Similarly, I suggest checking the following categories under Privacy & Security to consider if the app really needs the access or not:

• Contacts – which app do you allow to access your contacts? Allowing this usually means that the app wants to use your phone contacts. I do not allow many apps to do this.
• Calendars – typically only apps related to calendars will ask for this but still, a good thing to check.
• Photos – usually if the app wants to either read or save your photos, it will ask for this permission. Then you can choose to give it access to all photos or just a set.
• Bluetooth – I read that there are shopping apps that want access to your Bluetooth settings to help track you better when you are in their store. I find that creepy, so I check this periodically (but have not seen many requests for this permission).
• Local Network – should the app have access to your local Wi-Fi that the phone is connected to.
• Microphone, Camera – kind of self-explanatory, those two. Not many apps get access to microphone on my phone.

Keep going down the list and see if there are some other permission types that you’d want to limit. The principle is very similar to what I have shown above but might differ slightly depending on each setting.

But wait, there is more! Background app refresh setting…

Go into Settings > General > Background app refresh to check if the app is allowed to run in the background (when not actively in use). For example – a weather app that provides you weather alerts should have this allowed. But some other apps? Do they need to run in the background? Check it out:

Summary

As we download new apps, at times we might be in a rush and do not quite realize what permissions we give to apps when they run the first time. Therefore, you should periodically review various permissions that apps have been granted in your phone settings.

• On iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy & Security. After that, go to Settings > General > Background app refresh.
• On Android, please see this (settings may vary on your Android version).

Stay safe!