SerpApi.Org
For many of us, our phones contain a graveyard of little-used, forgotten apps — and they can pose a major security risk, according to cybersecurity experts.
The average American has about 80 apps downloaded on their phone at all times, and it’s likely there are at least a few of them that you don’t use anymore. If you want to make your personal information a little more secure, you ought to delete those unnecessary apps ASAP.
“Most people don’t realize that a lot of apps come by default with a lot of pretty expansive and comprehensive and exhaustive permissions. Very few people read the full terms and conditions,” said George Kamide, co-host of the cybersecurity podcast “Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks.”
He explained that many people often enable the app to know where they are located or to refresh background data when it is not being used.
“The issue is that [people] have an implicit trust that their best interests are being looked out for by the makers of the apps that they use,” said Adam Arellano, a field chief technology officer for Harness, a company that helps software developers write secure code more quickly.
“Worst-case scenario, you have apps that are developed in a very speedy fashion where security and privacy are a secondary consideration ... and your data is then available for exploitation by others,” Kamide said, citing a recent Tea app fiasco where many women downloaded a new app purported to support their safety when dating and then had their identities stolen in a data breach. Tea said 13,000 selfies and photo identifications submitted by users during account verification got exposed without their consent in a cyberattack.
And it’s not the only app with weak data security out there. Last year, 1.3 billion people received notices about their personal data being compromised, and a significant number of these breaches could have been prevented with basic cybersecurity, according to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The good news is that there’s an easy way to take action and immediately curb the information these apps have on you in the future.
The Case For Deleting More Apps On Your Phone
Simply deleting your unused apps on a regular basis will help curb what an app maker knows about you, and what criminals or government authorities seeking this valuable data from app makers can figure out, too. (Here’s how to delete an app from your device on iOS and Android devices.)
“Every two or three months when I’m bored or on a flight, I’ll go through and order the apps I use the most and ones that I haven’t used for a long time. I’ll just delete them,” Arellano said.
Kamide gave the example of deleting apps for limited uses like tracking sports scores and kids’ schedules. “If you don’t need those apps after the season is over, there’s no reason to keep them on your phone,” he said.
Keep in mind that deleting is not a cure-all approach for keeping your data safe on your phone. “It prevents future collection,” Arellano said. “Whatever information has been collected at that point is not affected by the app being deleted.”
And deleting apps that are tracking your location ― like Google Maps ― can help save your battery when it’s about to expire, too. “Location services [use] a lot [of phone battery], and you never know if you’re in a 5G zone or a one-bar zone,” Kamide said.
One More Reason To Delete More Apps? It’s Safer While Traveling In The U.S.
Regularly deleting apps will help save your phone battery and limit the distribution of your data, and it’s also a good habit to practice when traveling across U.S. borders right now.
That’s because by law, the U.S. government asserts the right to search and seize electronic devices crossing U.S. ports of entry, and there have been reported cases of border agents denying people entry over something as subjective as a meme or a social media app on their phone.
“Privacy protections are weaker at the border. I generally recommend minimizing risk by deleting or limiting access to sensitive apps that store personal communications, contacts, or location histories,” said Petra Molnar, lawyer and author of “The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
“Messaging apps, social media platforms, and cloud storage services are especially revealing, since they contain networks of connections and private data that can put others at risk as well as yourself,” she continued.
If you need to, you can always redownload the app for a later time. “For particularly sensitive travel, some people choose to carry a ‘clean phone’ with only the essential apps needed for the trip,” Molnar suggested. She said that as someone who works in human rights and migration, she will remove any sensitive data when traveling and only keep Signal as a messaging app on her phone, which is end-to-end encrypted.
Deleting your unnecessary apps may take a few minutes, but it can make a noticeable difference. We use mobile apps every day to scroll, shop and entertain ourselves, but they contain revealing data about what we do with our time and who we know.
“In general, I would encourage customers to not so willfully opt into the surveillance economy,” Kamide said.
That’s why deleting some of these lesser-used apps is one small but significant way to take back control and limit what someone can learn about you in the future. So the next time you have a few free minutes, check your phone apps list and start freely hitting that delete button.
