As you may know, related to a previous post, I was using Aviate launcher on Android. I was so happy with it that I started to speak about it around me and promoted it.

My friend Romaric (@evoxmusic) informed me that this software required too much access in his opinion and that I should look at the privacy policy of Aviate.

After starting reading it, I could find this:

we may collect Personal Information such as your name, email address, phone number, location information, unique device identifier, and third-party account credentials (for example, your log-in credentials for Facebook or other third party sites)

You can read the complete privacy policy here.

That is simply incredible! How could this be allowed so simply. Of course you have a warning popup when you try to install it, but all those clauses are not mentioned in the popup.

Following my friend recommendation, I made a pass on all my installed applications and removed the intrusive one.

After talking about that situation to a colleague (@taziden), he reminded me that using F-Droid is a good solution. It’s a store that provides softwares respecting your private life. I started to look at them and replaced some by others. I may do a blog post regarding those software in the next weeks.

To conclude, you should warn about the softwares you’re installing from the Google play store and other stores or manual APK installs.