As everyone probably knows at this point, each time an Android app is installed it has to tell the user what it will want access to. Be it location, SMS or general internet access, it’s all laid bare for us to see. It means that we can ask questions when an app asks for far too many permissions for what it’s supposed to do, for example. The problem is, not everyone pays attention.
We’ve done it ourselves. You want to try out an app so you just blindly stab your way through the required menus and options until the app is installed, ready for your perusal. But what if it’s doing something it shouldn’t?
If you’ve got a smartphone full of apps, working your way through to make sure everything’s above board is going to be time consuming, which makes it less likely that you’ll actually do it. Thankfully there are plenty of apps that promise to do the hard work for you, and one of those goes by the name of Clueful by Bitdefender.
What Clueful does is actually pretty simple, at least on the face of it. Once installed, Clueful will look at all the apps you have installed on the same device and then go off to find out which permissions you gave it when you installed it. It saves you all the hard work.
It’s the next part that’s most useful though. Once it’s done its homework, Clueful categorizes those apps based on their level of risk. If it is deemed to want too many permissions, it goes in the higher risk category. From here, the suspect apps can be uninstalled directly, removing another step from what could otherwise be a convoluted process.
Clueful is free, which means there really is no good reason to avoid giving it a go, even if you’re just a little but curious about what all those apps are doing. We install so many apps these days that it’s easy to forget to uninstall one you don’t use, and if it’s gathering data, you probably want it gone sooner rather than later.
If it doesn’t cost anything, what have you got to lose?
(Download: Clueful for Android on Play Store)
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