Data protection on Instagram, WhatsApp & Co. – how to find out which app is listening to you

Millions of people use Whatsapp, Instagram and Co. What about the privacy of these apps? (Symbolic image). © IMAGO/Zoonar.com/Marcus Friedrich

The smartphone makes our everyday life easier, but at the same time companies collect a lot of data about us without our knowledge. How users put the access of the apps in their place.

Munich – At the beginning of May, it became known that the Chinese social media platform TikTok had tracked a British journalist via her cat's account. To track down secret sources of the reporter. The messenger service WhatsApp was suspected of turning on the microphone. And numerous other social media apps grab users' location, even if there is no reason to do so. With a few simple settings, users can protect themselves against this – most of the time, anyway.

TikTok tracks critical journalist via her cat's social media account

Cristina Criddle, a reporter for the Financial Times, had been critical of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company. As an investigation by the New York Times revealed, ByteDance employees in the US and China had gained access to the journalist's data via the TikTok app – apparently to uncover her sources. Criddle had only created a TikTok account for her cat Buffy and did not bring her own name into play in the account's biography. States are apparently already aware of the alleged threat posed by the Chinese company Bytedance: Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the EU Commission have issued regulations prohibiting TikTok from being installed on business cell phones.

Now, very few users are certainly affected by such far-reaching data protection violations of the app and are a targeted victim of espionage like the journalist Criddle. Nevertheless, many users often reveal more to the apps than they realize. The wisdom still applies: If you don't pay anything for a product, you are the product yourself – or rather, your own data. Checking the settings on your smartphone is the only way to avoid unwanted access.

Constant transmission of data: Companies can create movement profiles

At the beginning of May, Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri reported that WhatsApp had accessed the microphone of his mobile phone while he was asleep and had therefore not used the app himself. This raised privacy concerns, but a little later it turned out that the reason was a suspected bug in the Android operating system, which Google also confirmed shortly afterwards. This apparently false alarm is nevertheless a good reason to take a close look at the installed apps. With the help of location data, companies can, for example, create movement profiles of their users. They then know where people spend their free time, where they work, where they shop and possibly also who they meet with.

For iOS devices from version 15 onwards, users can monitor exactly which app accesses which data under the menu item "App Privacy Report". Apple devices also use an optical signal at the top right of the screen to indicate that an app is currently gaining access to data. Depending on the color of the illuminated signal, this may indicate the use of microphone and camera (green dot), microphone (orange/yellow dot), or access to GPS location (blue dot). Starting with version 12, this feature is also available on Android devices.

If an application accesses the camera or microphone, for example, a green light also appears on Android. This function is intended to prevent secret eavesdropping on apps, but this can possibly be circumvented by experts, as research by BR and US researchers reveals. Users probably can't be completely safe from an eavesdropping attack.

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Tips from consumer advocates for more data protection on smartphones

Mobile phone owners can easily manage the permission of the individual apps on the smartphone themselves. On Apple devices, access to photos, location data and other information can be viewed and changed via "Settings/Privacy". If you are using an Android device, you will find this under the menu item "Apps". While location data is important for certain apps such as Google Maps, there is no reason for many other services to view this information.

Consumer advocates recommend that access to data should only be allowed if this is essential for functionality. If access to an application cannot be restricted, users should consider whether they really need this "possibly spying app," explains the consumer advice center.

• Download apps only through official stores such as App Store or Google Play Store
• Restriction of the authorization during installation or at least afterwards via "Settings"
• Grant data access only for necessary information and only for the necessary period of time – such as location data for navigation apps while navigating to a destination

Whistleblower Edward Snowden recommends Signal over WhatsApp

On Wednesday, it was announced that Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, is facing a record fine for data breaches in the EU. The background to this was the transfer of data from Facebook users from the European Union to a US server. If you still have privacy concerns about certain apps even after restricting access, you can look for alternatives. Whistleblower Edward Snowden, for example, advises using the Signal app to send short messages and make calls, as well as using a Tor browser.

In 2013, Snowden revealed that the United States and the United Kingdom monitor and collect data worldwide without suspicion. In his book "Permanent Record", the former intelligence officer describes a scene in which a father played with his son in front of a computer's webcam and was observed without his knowledge. So what many secretly fear can be a real danger. Security experts therefore recommend covering the webcam of your mobile phone and computer to be on the safe side. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently uses this advice and covers his camera on the computer, as a photo revealed.