Android app tip: LBE Privacy Guard

For those of us who worry more than the average bear about privacy, here's an Android app tip - grab LBE Privacy Guard. What is does is simple yet awesome: it lets you deny permissions to apps, on a case-by-case basis or through policies. Yes, finally you can stop the damn Facebook app knowing where you are all the time! Highly recommended. You do need a rooted phone to use it.

There's an alternative called PDroid which has some advantages, but it's a bit of a hacker-only thing - it requires modifications to your actual ROM (pre-modded ROMs are available for some phones). There's no ICS port yet unfortunately.

But you definitely want one or the other. It's amazing how much crap some apps want to get into. No, WhatsApp, you may NOT know about my call history, thanks. You're a messaging app. zap zap zap

edit: It's been pointed out that CyanogenMod 7 has built-in capabilities to do something like this. I'm running a non-CM ICS ROM at present, so I didn't notice. Looking around, there seem to be a few things cited as advantages of LBE / PDroid over the CM7 stuff, but I don't know in detail as I never tried the CM7 implementation. So hey, if you're running CM7, give that a try. I don't know if it exists in CM9.