Friday, June 3, 2011

App: Keep an eye on apps that access your private data with Lookout Privacy Advisor

There are quite a number of private data stored in our smartphone, including our identity, contact details, location tracks, address book details, phone call logs, SMS messages, etc.

Do you want to keep an eye on the apps installed in your Android smartphone, to know what kind of private data they are able to access? In fact, these apps get access to our private data because we allowed them so during installation.

Anyhow, we don't want the apps to access our private data unless really needed. For example, SMS application such as Handcent need to access our mobile number, address book and SMS messages in order for it to function, but it should not access our location tracks unnecessarily.

Lookout Mobile Security (Premium Edition) for Android has a handy tools called Privacy Advisor that can scan through all the installed apps in our phone and provide us the insight of what kind of private data they are able to access.


After the scan, Privacy Advisor  will report how many apps has access to our Track Location, Identity Info, Messages and Contacts respectively.


It will list out all the apps with such private data access, and provide detail explanation of the findings.


If we click the "App Info & Options" button, it will go to the phone's application management function, which we have the option to uninstall the app if we want.

I find this feature pretty useful, but it is not available in the free version of Lookout Mobile Security.

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