Put your privacy settings straight with these Privacy apps to protect your personal data
Among hundreds of thousands of apps on the playstore, many developers use a part of the permissions they ask for their apps to collect personal data for marketing purposes. Fortunately, with the help of a privacy app, you will able to keep a close eye on those required permissions and deny those that seem to invade your privacy. We have chosen privacy apps and android permission management apps you should use to keep your anonymity intact!
In case you’re also worried about someone digging up your personal data by accessing the device we recommend using an app lock. You can also Hide Apps, Files & Photos. We also strongly recommend to use a good password manager.
We strongly recommend using these best privacy apps for Android!
1. App Ops – Permission manager
Apps Ops allows to manage hidden permissions of other apps and you can easily enable or disable those you feel that invade your piracy. It uses a great interface and is very intuitive to handle. The app only takes 203 kb in storage space and is completely free. The latest version comes with the support of multiuser. More features will be added soon, as promised by the developer.
Moreover, it also works on non-rooted devices. however, users need to install an extra app called Shizuku and use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) command, but this requires the PC connection and some setup process. See our guide on how to setup ADB.
2. Permission Manager
Permission Manager uses a stylish holo interface that allows for swiping with left and right gestures to alter privacy settings for individual apps. The exciting part is that it offers a detailed analysis of the most dangerous apps and the permission they ask. So, basically you can see the potential harmful permissions and quickly turn them off.
3. Bouncer – Temporary App Permissions
Bouncer is a great privacy app that works very well by granting permissions temporarily in case you need to allow some apps to access certain information for a short period of time. For example, if you want to check-in to a place on Facebook or another social media app, or want to geo-tag a picture while using the camera app, you can enable location permission which will be turned off again automatically as soon as you exit the app.
This way users no need to worry about what apps are doing in the background. In addition, the battery life also improves as apps are not able to drain battery with the background process.
4. Avast Antivirus – Mobile Security & Virus Cleaner
On top of being one of the best antivirus available on the Android platform, Avast can also handle privacy very efficiently. It displays a list of potential threats for the system and provides the options to uninstall or deny certain permissions. You can get insights about installed apps and access rights they are using.
Users also get alert when spyware or adware-infected apps being downloaded on your device which occasionally happens when you browse some shady websites. Furthermore, It can also detect ads and pin protect apps. Avast is a complete solution for all security-related tasks for android devices.
5. Jumbo: Privacy + Security
Jumbo recently made a lot of buzz among the privacy concern people after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and got positive reviews from the tech enthusiasts on various media. Jumbo is a relatively new startup company promised to protect your personal data and online footprints by deleting old social posts or personal information you leave behind online and tweaking other privacy settings on different apps.
Based on the apps and services you use it pulls together a list of recommendations to protect your anonymity. It’s basically a quick solution to manage all your privacy settings from one place. The company also claimed they don’t collect and store any data as there is no server-side process when scanning your settings.
6. Phone Guardian VPN Protection
This is a free and secure virtual private network app that hide ip address and prevents hackers from stealing sensitive data using spyware when surfing the internet. It helps to get rid of all the spammy ads for a clean browsing experience. Users also get an overview of the app usage and see which apps are running in the background.
7. K-9 Mail
Al of the scams happens in the online world, most of them come through spammy emails. K-9 Mail is an open-source email client aimed to secure your email handling. It supports multiple accounts, search, IMAP push email, multi-folder sync, signatures & many more features!
To add an extra layer of security users can use an additional app OpenKeychain: Easy PGP which enables K-9 Mail to add encryption to your conversation.
8. DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser
Almost every website and search engine uses cookies to track the movement of users and browser history while browsing and many web services collect personal data through the browser. DuckDuckGo promised to give users safe browsing and protect from third-party trackers including advertising networks. The app also force sites to use an encrypted connection whenever they can to restrict information collecting by prying internet service providers.
Also, as you already noticed most of the time your browser gets flooded with the related ads form the query you used earlier. With DuckDuckGo you can do the safe search without being traced to personal queries.
9. Telegram
Telegram is the famous private messaging app that uses 2048-bit RSA encryption along with 256-bit symmetric AES encryption. With end-to-end encryption enabled only the sender and recipient is able to view the actual text. No wonder it does a great job at securing your private conversion as quite a few governments banned the app in many countries.
You can also use Signal Private Messenger if you’re more interested in securing multimedia messages including images, voice, and video chat.
10. Protect Me – Accounts and Mobile Security
Protect me scans and detect unnatural activities within apps to prevent unauthorized access to steal data from your online log-in details. The app gives warning whenever it finds out any suspicious login attempt made by an attacker in your wifi network or any automatic wifi connections.
Keep your data secure and feel safe with privacy protection apps listed above. You should also check out more top quality Android apps in our best free android app lists section.
Glad I found a couple of apps here that I use myself, such as Avast or Telegram. Beforehand, I used the private mode of Google, but there was a scandal that claimed they still collected data even in incognito mode, so I got Surfshark VPN to secure my connection even more. I also use some extension that helps me clean cookies and cache quickly.
How is this list without Snap Search (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cybersky.snapsearch)
It’s definitely one of the best for Privacy on android guys..
I would like to add in this list a new app for Android called PlusPrivacy.
PlusPrivacy provides you with a unified dashboard for protecting yourself from a variety of threats to your privacy. It will enable you to control the privacy settings in your social network accounts, hide your email identity, block ads, trackers and malware and prevent unwanted apps and browser extensions from tracking you and collecting your private data.