The efficient management of the permissions granted to applications is a pending task of the Android operating system. In fact, there are countless applications that request misplaced permissions, for example that a radio app requests permissions to access calls. To have everything under control and prevent surprises, it is best to find a way to give temporary permissions to applications on Android .
There are applications that are not considered harmful because they do not make any changes to our device, but they abuse the permissions we grant them to collect statistics . We are living in a time when our privacy in the network is almost a right and you can not freely trade with our data. But not all companies play clean , so we have to use some tricks.
How to give temporary permissions to applications with the Bouncer app.
The application that we are going to use in this tutorial is Bouncer . It is an app developed by Sam Ruston, a renowned Android programmer with applications such as Flamingo (Twitter client) behind his back.
If we had to define in a few words what Bouncer does, I would say that it is an application that allows managing the permissions of installed apps . The big advantage is that Bouncer allows you to manage these permissions so that they can be assigned temporarily .
In other words, Bouncer assigns the permissions that we want to an application, but it will also be responsible for removing them . This supposes advantages in security and privacy.
Application to prevent applications from abusing their permissions on Android.
Say that the Bouncer application is available on Google Play and for the time being under a beta version, but its operation is correct. It has a cost of € 0.89 but we will not find any advertising or purchases within the application or anything related to the usual micropayments. The app is simple and does not offer anything further from its main objective.
It is true that we will have to trust Bouncer, since we will delegate the task of managing the permissions of the rest of the apps in a single app . This may worry the most distrustful, but the app only makes use of the accessibility services of the operating system . It does not make connections to the internet, does not access our personal data or anything similar, so we can say that it is legit.
Once Bouncer is installed, it will start to work. Now, every time we install a new application and request special permissions, Bouncer will intervene with a notification. From this notification we can configure if the permit will be temporary or permanent.
Types of Bouncer temporary permits.
The application allows to establish periods of time during which an app will maintain the permissions . For example, we can establish that an application obtain certain permissions for 30 minutes, one hour, six hours, one day, etc.
A very interesting option is the possibility that the application has the necessary permissions while we use it, but when we leave we no longer have permissions. This not only helps improve security, it also reduces the background activity of the apps, while reducing battery consumption.
Now it will be safer to use those applications that use our camera, GPS or access our storage or contacts. If we do not trust what they do in the background in case they collect data, we assign temporary permits and that's it.