Just how much personal information are your apps gathering? “And do they really need so much? The average smartphone user these days has between 60 and 90 apps on their device. Most of these apps request some sort of information about you and the device you are using. They may want to know your name, your email address, or your real-world address. But because smartphones are so powerful, they can also get quite a bit more than that, such as your exact location. Some apps will even request access to the device’s camera or microphone. While all of this is done with the user’s consent, you may be surprised at the level of access some apps have to personal data. Did you know that 45 percent of the most popular Android apps and 25 percent of the most popular iOS apps request location tracking, for example? Or that 46 percent of popular Android apps and 25 percent of popular iOS apps request permission to access your device’s camera? Some Android apps even ask you to give them access to your SMS messages and phone call logs. Under the microscope – In order to find out what kind of data your apps may be looking for, we decided to put the most popular to the test. We downloaded and analyzed the top 100 free apps as listed on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store on May 3, 2018. For each app, we tried to find out two main things: how much personal information was the user sharing with the app and which smartphone features the app accessed?…”