It is well known that mobile applications often ask for rights they don’t require. You’ve probably noticed that some of your Android applications ask for a lot of permissions that have nothing to do with what they’re meant to perform. For example, a flashlight app can ask for access to your location, camera, or microphone. When an application requests permissions beyond what it needs to operate, it generally does so to allow the app’s developer to gather as much information about you as possible and sell it to marketers and data brokers.
Keep an eye out for permissions that provide access to your location, contacts, camera, microphone, browser history, and picture collection. If they aren’t specifically necessary for an app to work, they may be very intrusive and dangerous. An app may gather a great deal of private information via certain permissions, which might seriously jeopardize your privacy if the information is handled improperly or compromised. For this reason, controlling app permissions on your Android devices is crucial.
Keeping your app’s permissions as low as possible is crucial while managing them. Permit your Android applications to access just the information they need to on your smartphone in order to perform the functions you need. For instance, it seems sense that in order for your navigation or weather app to work correctly, it needs access to your location. But there’s no reason why it should have access to your contacts or camera. Additionally, if you can manually input your city or ZIP code, you may not even need to provide your location information to a weather app.
Thankfully, modifying an app’s rights on an Android device is simple, and you have the option of managing permissions by category or by app.
Keep in mind that Android 11 and later smartphones may use the procedures listed below. This is how to control your Android device’s app permissions.
How to control the permissions of individual Android apps
You may control permissions on a per-app basis if you’re worried about the rights given to a particular app on your Android smartphone. What to do is as follows:
1. Select Settings.
2. Select Apps.
3. hit the app in question after scrolling down (or hit the magnifying glass icon to search for the app).
4. Select Permissions.
5. To approve or deny a permit, tap on it.
Additionally, you can press and hold the icon of any app on your phone’s screen to bring up the Permissions menu. To reach the App info menu, press the Info icon in the upper right corner of the window that appears. Then, choose Permissions.
You may also activate the “Remove permissions if app is unused” function from the App Info menu. This feature deletes the app’s permissions after three months of inactivity.
How to control the permissions of Android apps by type
You may adjust your app permissions by permission type if you want to check which applications you’ve given or refused access to a particular permission, such as your location or microphone. Here’s how:
1. Select Settings.
2. Press the Privacy button.
3. Select Permission Manager.
4. To find out which applications support the chosen permission, tap the permission type.
5. Choose Allow or Don’t Allow after tapping on an app.
How to control microphone and camera access across all applications
If you wish to take a strict stance with those two permissions, you can even use a single toggle switch to globally block all applications from using your camera and/or microphone. Toggle camera and microphone permissions for all applications on your Android smartphone by following these steps:
1. Select Settings.
2. Press the Privacy button.
3. Turn on and off the microphone and camera.
By using this approach, you can ensure that no app has access to your microphone or camera. However, note that if you have these permissions set to the “off” option, video communication applications that depend on your camera and microphone to function, like as Zoom or Skype, will not function as intended.