You probably spend a lot of your day inside apps: catching up on the news, playing music and movies, keeping in touch with friends, racing cartoon characters around a track, and so on. Every once in a while though, it's worth running an audit on these apps to make sure they're not overreaching and going beyond their remit—collecting more data about you and controlling more of your devices than you'd like.
Here's how you can put controls on what your apps are allowed to do on Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS.
Choosing App Permissions
App permissions[1] are the privileges an app has—like being able to access your phone's camera or your laptop's contact list—but deciding which ones to switch on or off isn't an exact science.
Granting those permissions isn't in and of itself a mistake; generally, trusted developers won't request anything they don't need for the app to function, even if that purpose isn't immediately clear. Facebook Messenger asks for access to your microphone, for instance, not because it's eavesdropping on you[2] but because it has a voice-memo function.
That said, if you don't plan on ever using that feature, you might as well disallow it. Similarly, an app might request access to your contacts so you can more easily share a link or split a bill with someone—it isn't necessarily harvesting all your contact data and putting it in a database somewhere. But if blocking that contact access doesn't break basic functionality? Go for it.
If you really want to dig deep into these permissions, check out the app's data and privacy policy as well, which should explain what it does with the data that gets collected (like your location or contacts list). These policies are often couched in vague language