Curb your apps’ curiosity

Are you min­imising your data use, and have you removed all apps you don’t actu­ally need from your mobile devices? Well done – now you should ensure you restrict your existing apps’ per­mis­sions. This will make your devices less prone to attack and serves to pro­tect your privacy.

There are cer­tain apps you like to use fre­quently; still you might not always need to rely on all of the func­tion­ality they have to offer. One example for this is the Mes­senger app, which for instance enables you to share your loca­tion directly with all your con­tacts. To do so, this app must be allowed to access your loca­tion infor­ma­tion and needs the rel­e­vant per­mis­sions to do so. If you don’t need this func­tion, you should deac­ti­vate it, since it poses an unnec­es­sary threat to your secu­rity and privacy.

Use your mobile device’s pri­vacy set­tings to restrict the per­mis­sions of such apps. Under iOS and Android , you will find these in your set­tings, under such head­ings as “pri­vacy”, “data pro­tec­tion” or “app permissions”.