The Android experience IV

Part four of the Android experience …

I’ve read a lot about Android, iOS, Symbian and WindowsPhone, prior to the purchase of my mobilesmartphone. I already owned a so called smartphone 6 years ago, a QTek9090 made by HTC. A WindowsMobile5 powered device. Back in those days, nobody talked about apps, there were more applications for WindowsCE or WindowsMobile. WindowsMobile wasn’t that good at this time, the device was heavy and formed like a brick

I think most of the people buying a Smartphone know about pros and cons, so I don’t deal with them. Every system has is benefits. Most of you heard about affairs regarding personal privacy, asked yourself how secure iOS is, or why you should trust a company, which stores your data in a country with the lowest privacy laws in whole Europe (RIM).

You have already decided and you have to deal with it.

OR you’ll get active and participate!

I want to present two apps in this part of the experience. These apps help you to keep your private data your private data. I’ve found two apps, which are powerful enough to be named:

• Permissions Denied and
• LBE Privacy Guard

Both apps allow you to cut the permissions of installed apps. LBE privacy Guard will categorize all installed apps, and allows you to cut the permissions based on the following categories:folgenden Kategorien:

• Expenses
  apps, which could generate costs (sending SMS, make calls)
• PIM Access
  apps, which can access your personal data (address-book, SMS/MMS storage, call lists)
• Location Access
  apps which can locate your phone (based on the current logged in mobile cell and/or known WiFi networks, or based on GPS satelites)
• Phone ID
  apps which can access the telephone information like IMEI, phonenumber, SIM numer, IMSI etc.
• Internet Access
  apps which can access the internet

Requests done by apps are logged in the so called access log and can be viewed by the user. You can create rules, which apply if the user is not “answering” the prompt created by the LBE Security Guard. The default setting is set to “reject”.

LBE Privacy Guard is a system service and is launched during the boot process and watches all running apps and asks the user to configure new installed apps.

The other app, Permissions Denied is working a little different. The app also requires root access. Permissions denied lists all installed apps, reads all requested rights and shows them. The apps are listed and the user is able to configure each app. Every permission has its own brief description, which is localised most time.

Tapping an app will toggle the tapped permission (active -> inactive; inactive -> active). As far as I can say is a reboot required to finally apply the changes made. Permissions Denied writes the changed permissions in the so called permissions-store provided by Android. The changes are applied after every reboot.

Permission Denied allows you to be much more precise on restricting apps than LBE Privacy Guard. LBE Privacy Guard is on the other hand very user friendly and easy to use.

I’ll do some more tests to check if both apps can coexist on the same system without harming it.

Part five of the Android experience will deal with the fight against the shipped apps and shows a easy way to identify apps based on there cryptic names.