From the Dark Side
by Tiny Ruisch
I’ve written before about one of the real pains of using the Android operating system on your pocket computer. When you install or update an application, it is important that you check the permissions to make sure the application doesn’t do anything that might be nasty.
I’ve found a 1.6 mg application that will help you monitor the software installed on your device. The Clueful Privacy Advisor is a free program from Bitdefender. It monitors all of your installed applications and gives you detailed information about what they do in the background. Other apps of this type that I looked at usually just check and give you a list of permissions for your installed software.
Clueful goes a step further and reports on what your applications are actually doing. It does this by keeping a database of apps on a remote server and examining the apps on your device. It then calculates a precise and personal overview of how vulnerable you are. You can evaluate and take appropriate actions for each installed app.
Whenever you download a new application from the Play Store, you get your normal notification that it was successfully installed. You also get a notification from Clueful letting you know of any risks in using your new application.
On an interesting side note, the iOS App Store has removed Clueful Privacy Advisor. Many tech bloggers have speculated that this was done because the program was too good at identifying applications with privacy problems. I’ll not give my opinion. Instead I’ll just suggest you do an internet search and decide for yourself.
Here is one interesting (at least I thought it was) user comment I copied from the Google Play Store User Reviews Section:
Reviewer – It reports their own anti-virus tool in the “slightly dodgy” section 🙂
Bitdefender replied on May 22, 2013
We consider it’s only fair to our users to give clues about all installed apps with no exception! Some apps have legitimate reasons to access your data in order to run properly. It’s up to you to decide if a certain app represents a privacy threat for you.
You can download the Clueful Privacy Advisor from the Google Play Store. Give it a try. The price is free.