Enjoy part 2 of 5 of this Android Academy Privacy Edition mini course.
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Hello and I want to welcome you to the Android Academy Privacy Edition, a series of 20+ videos where you and I are going to learn exactly how to protect your privacy and security on your Android phone. Hello, I want to welcome you to the Android Academy Privacy Module number 2. In the past module we've talked about exactly how the Android operating system works
when it comes to handling your private information. Everything is compartmentalized and every single hardware and software sensor do you have in your phone has to have permission from the Android operating system in order to provide that access to applications. They don't have direct access.
They need to ask for permission kind of like a little child needs to ask permission from their parents to access their drawer for example. Now what I want to tackle today in this video is that for example you download an application and now you want to see what are some of the permissions that the application has requested before because people normally when they download applications and they open them up they normally don't read.
Normally you see a little pop-up come up for example it says Instagram or Facebook or TikTok wants to have access to your photos or to your contacts. Sometimes this pop-up just comes up over and over again because they're interested in collecting as much data as possible. So let's talk about the why. Social media applications or other applications for that matter want to have as much access to your data as possible. Why? Because first of all they could sell this information to their partners through Google or other services in order to provide you with relevant services. They sell these for fractions of cents and then in return they provide that information to advertisers so they can send you relevant information. If you're okay with that we're totally fine with that as well.
They also require this access for example to your location to your GPS coordinates and other things in order to see analytics as to who's using their phone, what operating system do you have for example in case of TikTok. There's recently been a lot of conversations about this and in a lot of ways it's a normal practice. I've built my own applications before and we needed access to all that information. I'm going to show you that in future modules. The back end of the whole thing when it comes to designing applications and seeing this useful information. But there's ethical rules where you should not be collecting more information than necessary in order to run your application.
For example the location information is necessary for you to know who's using your application so you can implement new features and new services. You can also have what's called the user agent. You would like to know what Android version they're using just so you can have your app optimized for that Android version so on and so forth. You understand that this information could be useful for developers. Now in this video I'm going to show you how to see what information and what permissions certain applications require. So let's go for example let's go to Facebook. So normally when you pull up your app drawer on your Android phone you can see all these applications. Let's pull up Facebook for example. It's actually on my home screen. On most Android phones, I'm showing this to you on a Samsung Galaxy, but this works on most Android phones.
If you press and hold on an application you'll see a little eye icon. That's it. Go and tap on it. If you don't see the eye icon, if you open the application and tap the multitasking button, you can tap on the F for example and then tap on app info. It's the same thing. In here if you scroll down just a little bit you'll find where it says permissions. If you tap on permissions you'll see that Facebook is asking for access to my camera, my location, microphone notifications, photos and videos. Some of these things make sense. For example, photos and videos are necessary for Facebook to access just so Facebook can post videos for me. I actually post stuff. However, if you don't post anything, if you're concerned about your privacy, we can do hypothetically. See there's two lists.
At the very top you see allowed. At the very bottom you see not allowed. For example, I don't feel comfortable sharing my calendar with Facebook and it wants access to my calendar. Why would why on earth would Facebook want access to my calendars? Sometimes there's certain features in Facebook where you can actually schedule things and you just want to have the convenience of adding it. However, we don't know is this calendar being uploaded to Facebook as well?
Do they now know all of your upcoming appointments and are they going to offer you specific things to buy during those appointments? You don't know. Contacts, same thing with contacts. Why on earth would Facebook want access to my contacts? That's because they want to match me with other people, my acquaintances, just so they can offer us to be friends. Just so they can interconnect us and create what's called like audiences so they can offer certain services to people like me and Mary for example who's in my contacts.
And access to my phone. I don't make any phone calls using Facebook so that's why I've disallowed these. How do you do that? For example, if you do not want to give Facebook access to your photos and videos, you just tap on photos and videos and then there's really two options. Allow, do not allow. Boom that's it. Just do not allow. And then once you do that, once you go back, you see that the photos and videos has jumped down to the do not allow list. If you change your mind, you can always go back, tap on this and tap on allow. Now when you go back, it's gonna jump back up. That is it folks. In a future video I'm going to show you how to pause or how to automatically revoke access to certain features where you don't have to actually go and manually do this.
If for example you used Facebook for a while and then you haven't used a certain feature like let's say you haven't uploaded photos in a while, then it's just going to automatically revoke this instead of you doing this manually. So thanks so much for watching this module and I will see you next one.
Privacy Training Module 2: Privacy Permissions