Too much information? Yes.

Apps are our daily life. Do we need a taxi? We get out. MyTaxi. Do we want a hotel for tonight? We went to Hotel Tonight. Didn't we get to eat? We sent a WhatsApp. Someone is late? Departure to Candy CrushAnd so it could continue for each and every situation we experience. Our phones have, on average, 39 Apps installed We all already give them permission to access our information. Too much? Yes, surely.

A recently published report, in which the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) states that almost a third of apps require excessive permissions for the functions they perform, which means that they take control of parts of the user's phone (camera, calls, contacts, location) without any justification.

Mainly, the Apps that we have installed ask for (and we give them) access to our location (32%), followed by the phone identifier (16%), access to other accounts (15%), the camera (10%), contacts (9%) and, to a lesser extent, to the call log, SMS, calendar and microphone. Data that, in principle, is necessary for the proper functioning of the installed App and the basis of its functionality, which is why we have downloaded it, but this is not always the case.

Some apps ask for access to information that has little or nothing to do with the functionality for which we have chosen it.For example, storage apps or games that ask to access the call log; an app that simulates a flashlight that asks to know when you are connected or apps that, in order to register using a Facebook account, ask for access to your contact list on this network. All of this information has nothing to do with the functionality of the application but is an essential condition for being able to install them.

The report, prepared by 27 data protection entities members of the Global Privacy Enforcement Network, also reveals that Only the 15% of the apps provides reliable information and clear about how users' personal data will be collected and processed. “Asking for permission and respecting privacy rules is not usually something that programmers consider in the first instance, but users do not give it any importance either. And these are the first ones who should be careful with their privacy,” says Santiago Begué, head of the Appytest service at the BDigital technology centre, in statements published in the Newspaper of Extremadura. “If a program asks to have access to the user's calendar, it might have to consider whether it needs it. But for the user it seems that if it is free, everything is fine, and he has not understood that When something is free on the internet, it means that the user is the product.“, he says.

To carry out this study, more than 1,100 mobile apps for both iOS and Android were analyzed.