It’s no secret that when you install an app on your smartphone, it asks you for certain permissions. Well, perhaps ‘asks’ is the wrong term – it tells you what it will do, and if you don’t like it you can just not use the app, there’s no real choice involved. The problem is, many of us install apps without checking what the app will be doing at all, a holdover from our approach to privacy policies.

Source: Welivesecurity.com

Some permissions seem nefarious but really aren’t. For example, if an app says it needs to ‘monitor your phone state,’ that would be understandably concerning, however all that means is that the app needs to be able to determine is you’re receiving a call and hand control back to the phone so the phone can tell you there’s a call coming in and allow you to answer.

But what about an app that needs to read your contact list or emails? There may be a valid reason, and as this Lifehacker post notes, you need to compare the requested permissions against the purpose of the app itself. However, if yo9u don’t know what the permissions are in the first place how could you make that determination?

I felt this video from the Privacy Project was very interesting, as it asked people to read some of the permissions their apps were requesting out loud. They were all unnerving scary, such as wanting to read texts and turn airplane mode off(!).

Again, not all scary-sounding permission requests are actually scary. But you want to know what’s going on with your phone, especially if you keep a lot of info there.