Total Control

What does this privacy tool protect you against?

Our phones usually contain a LOT of our personal information: where we are, where we’ve been, who our friends are (from your contact list and from your social media apps), who we talk to the most, who we texted this morning, what we and our friends look like (from our photos), and much more! Until you take total control, a lot of people can have access to all that data. But you can put a stop to that!

How can you apply Total Control privacy tools?

1. Get to know your phone’s privacy and security settings. You can turn off a lot of things on your phone that either collect or share your data. It can take some digging, and some settings are more obvious than others, but once you make the effort to find out, you can lock down your phone and call the shots!

2. Understand how applications on your phone work and talk to each other. Have you ever noticed that when you install a new app, it asks you for a bunch of permissions? Have you ever wondered why a game would need to have access to your photos? In most cases, there’s no reason to give a game or app access to everything on your phone. You can remove those permissions once the app is installed and it works just fine.

Time to do a little investigation of your own!

Go to the Family Section of the Google Play store (go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/FAMILY if you’re using a computer).

Pick an app that you think you might want to download and click on it.

Scroll down to where it says “Additional Information” near the bottom of the page. Find “Permissions” under that heading and click on “View details” below that.

Scroll through the list that pops up of things that the app will ask other apps, or the device, to do or to tell it. Write them down and discuss what each one means together. Which seem like they’re really important for the app and which do you think might not be necessary?