Although consumers rarely take this step due to the large amount of verbiage in these clauses, it is an important piece to protecting your privacy. Learn more about APS's privacy policies.
Social media permissions are what enable social media applications to integrate with other applications and devices.
Social media is ubiquitous. You often share a lot of personal information when interacting on social media. In addition, social media platforms are usually interconnected. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., all integrations with one another. If you combine these elements, you get a recipe for disaster: a user may have a lot of personal information available to the public in a lot of different places. Social media applications may access publicly available information (such as name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username and user ID). They may also be accessing data from the device itself and the network it is attached to such as:
Contact list/Call logs
GPS/Geolocation
IP address
Device type/ID
Carrier Information
Search History
Using this information, they can:
Begin to build a profile on a user and discern within a reasonable doubt where a person works, where they live, who their friends are, etc. Using this information.
Issue targeted-marketing campaigns based on demographic information gathered from social media.
Affect your life through social engineering, perhaps by stealing your identity or even worse.
Share information automatically across different applications and networks.
Another reason to be aware of Social Media Permissions is the fact that once information is exposed, it will be there forever. Divulging information to a party that was not intended to receive it is called oversharing. It is a fair assumption that everything posted on the internet will be around “forever.” Using the internet’s wayback machine (and similar tools), the public can see past versions of webpages. This means that even after something has been taken down (perhaps an embarrassing incident of oversharing), you should assume that the information, post or photo will remain online in some form or another.
Therefore, being aware of and appropriately managing Social Media Permissions will help a user maintain their privacy and security.
The most important thing you can do to protect yourself is to limit app permissions. Applications should be configured to give them the lowest possible level access. Be aware of what the “default” settings and how to change them.