Android: do the permissions influence when installing an application?

If you are a user of Android, you will have seen that when you install a application asks if you want to give him a series of permits. Thanks to these permissions, the application may or may not use certain components of your phone, as well as access certain information stored on it. The million dollar question is:you discarded ever an application for requesting «excessive permits«? Or did you click "Accept"> "Accept", as Microsoft used to?

Reading the highly recommended blog Clockwork Apple, I learn that researchers at the University of Cambridge have published a study about the Android app store.

The study is mainly dedicated to reviewing the amount of permissions that applications request, showing that free applications tend to request access to more permissions than paid ones, and then presents a discussion on the subject.

Not least data is that the number of people who use an application does not seem to be influenced by the amount of personal information that it requests. What's more, apps that ask for more personal data seem to be even slightly more popular than those that don't.

In other words, it seems that when installing an application most people do not pay any attention or do not give importance to the type (and amount) of personal information that the application is collecting.

Anyone who has an Android device can see that many applications collect information that has nothing to do with their purpose.

For example, Skype asks for your location (for what?) And permission to manage your Android accounts. Facebook basically asks for everything, including reading the identity of your phone calls and the content of your text messages. Also, many of the banking apps ask to read things like your contact list. Another example, the Banco de Brasil application (one of the largest in the world) asks for access to your call list!

If we do not give importance to permissions when installing applications on our cell phone / mobile, do we really care about our privacy?

Help! What I can do?

Although there are security mechanisms that allow us to make the experience of dumping our entire life on our mobile phone safer, reality shows that the average user does not actively monitor what permissions they grant to each application they install.

For all this it is that it never hurts, today more than ever, to periodically control the permissions of the applications we install, their reliability, and to weigh whether we really need it on our phone.

In the case of Android, there is already an interesting number of applications that are responsible for reviewing the permissions requested by all the others that we have installed, but generally they suffer from various problems such as being paid, taking a long time to scan the system, or the most paradoxical , being the ones who request, suspiciously, too many permits.

That is why Permission Explorer is an option to recommend, since in addition to analyzing hundreds of installed applications in seconds, it allows to detail the permissions granted to each one, ordering the results by categories of permissions that make the review much easier for, for example , see what applications on our phone mess with our text messages.

And the best? Permission Explorer is completely free, does not show advertising, and does not use a single special permission to fulfill its function. We can download it right now from the Android Market (now renamed Google Play) and start to monitor more closely what happens on our android.

Source: Clockwork Apple & Geekotic