Apps that have acess to your photos (and other personal things)

[armagezon]

Ok, this might be silly, but i notice several apps that require access to my photos and videos, my microphone or even my wallet (!)!

Is this as outrageous as it sounds? How do millions of peple trust apps that any time can browse their photos and see extremely personal pictures and videos, notes etc?

Am i missing something here?

 

[hopmedic]

Check out this post. It will answer your question at least in part. To put it briefly, though, some advertising networks (for the ads that make money for the devs), they require media library access. If an app has voice command support, or speech to text, microphone is required, even if it isn't obvious to you that the app has this support. To tell what has speech command support, tap/hold Start, tap the question mark, and swipe from the right to see a list of the apps, as well as examples of what you can say to them. For wallet, I haven't used or researched that, so I can't answer that one.

I would say that most of the time the developers are honest people just trying to make an honest buck. Myself, I hate that my apps say they need media library access, but that's part of the game of building apps. I still haven't figured out why it needs it, but to display an ad from Microsoft's ad network, that's one of the requirements.

 

[armagezon]

Thank you for the post. I see the reasons, but my main concern is : can we really trust them? Have any incidents of misuse of our personal data been reported?

 

[hopmedic]

Thank you for the post. I see the reasons, but my main concern is : can we really trust them? Have any incidents of misuse of our personal data been reported?

The only way I can answer that is to tell you that Microsoft tests every app. How in-depth they test, I don't know. I do know that there has been exacty one app that was found to be misusing location information, the AGV Antivirus app, and as soon as it was discovered, Microsoft pulled it. Whether there are others, I can't say other than like I said, they test the apps. Being that one of Microsoft's greatest concerns is security, I have to hope that they test for what you fear, but I'm sure they're not going to come out with a checklist of everything they test for. Part of the checklist is "security" - whatever that means.......