Lesson 6
What Your Apps Can Reach
Give an app only the access its job needs, treat when and how closely as separate choices, and use the phone’s own tracking controls.
One key, not the whole house
Ama wants rain alerts for wherever she happens to be, and her weather app wants her location all the time, and precisely. Before she decides, it helps to know what a permission is. Your phone keeps certain things locked away, such as location, microphone, camera, photos and contacts, and an app has to ask the phone for each one. A permission is a key to one of those rooms.
So the permission list is a list of keys, not an inventory of everything an app knows. What you type into an app, what its account holds and what it can guess from your internet connection all sit outside the locked rooms. Saying no to location doesn’t hide the delivery address you type in.