Many apps require permissions to access you social media accounts and data, and it is common practice to grant third party applications access to your Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and other accounts so they could post updates, upload files etc.
So many, in fact, that we don’t even remember how many apps can access our accounts on different services. The fact of the matter, however, is that giving access to all these third party applications may put your privacy at risk.
You could go in and check each service and the permissions that were granted to different apps, but this can be a very time consuming task.
Instead, your could use ‘MyPermissions’, a free iPhone app that will consolidate and display information about permissions granted to all of the different services into one place It currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn and many more.
Getting Started with Permissions
Using this nifty application is very simple and straightforward. Once installed, just launch the app and you will be presented a list of all the services that you can check and revoke access to (see screenshot below left). You will need to enter your credentials to access any of the services, but once inside you can easily revoke access to any app accessing that service right then and there from within the ‘MyPermissions’ app (see screenshot below right).
You can even manage the information you are willing to share with your friends on Facebook. Just go to Block tab, tap on Set Permissions, login with your Facebook account and manage the information you want to share.
The Verdict
Permissions for iPhone is a very handy application for people who want to find out which apps have access to their accounts. You could manage permissions for each service on its own without the app, of course, but ‘Permissions’ brings it all into a single place, and makes managing your permissions an efficient and streamlined process, and a lot more likely to actually happen.
One thing which I didn’t like about the service is that you cannot login with multiple accounts (say if you have more than one Facebook account, etc). This is unfortunate because the fact of the matter is that most people manage multiple accounts on different social networking websites or on Gmail, etc. The second drawback is that it doesn’t have any logout button in the app (I tried to find one but couldn’t. If there was, my first criticism wouldn’t matter.)
Apart from that, it’s a very handy application that we highly recommend. Feel free to share your views if you gave this application a try.
