Everyone loves free apps – but many people don’t realize that many popular apps for your phone and other gadgets gain access to your private information. And most app developers won’t say what they do with the information they gather from users, according to a story in USA Today.
When you install most apps, you often grant permission for the app to access certain features and information. Most people “accept” any permissions that the app requests without considering the potential privacy issues, even if the app clearly doesn’t need the range of access it has requested. A flashlight app shouldn’t need access to your location or internet settings, yet you may download such an app without even realizing you granted such access.
To uncover these privacy issues, individuals would have to read through lengthy (and often vague) privacy statements from each app they download, and even then would often need to follow-up by contacting each developer to find out what they do with private data once it is collected.
Fortunately, Carnegie Mellon University has created a website called PrivacyGrade that tracks Android apps and rates them on their privacy policy and openness. The scoring, from A to F, is based on the app’s permissions and libraries, and on how well the developer explains its privacy policies.