You Should Double Check Which Apps Can See Your iPhone Photos

It happens way too often. You install a new, interesting app. The app asks you to grant it permission to your photo library, and you end up granting it full access. That is, after all, the most convenient option. Doing this for a trusted, popular app like Instagram or Slack is fine, useful even. But not all apps are built the same.

In fact, researchers have recently found photo-scanning malware apps on the App Store. Yes, malware has started to make its way from Android to the iPhone. Dubbed SparkCat, this is a kind of malware framework that runs in the background, running OCR on all your photos in hopes of finding credentials to your crypto account. But any app that has access to your entire photo library can, theoretically, access text inside photos, like your credit card details, or your IDs (though you should never keep unprotected photos of important documents in your Camera Roll).

In light of this news, and as a way to make sure that unnecessary or smaller apps aren’t accessing all your photos, you should take some time to audit which apps have complete photos access, and revoke apps that don’t really need it.

Revoke photo access for iPhone apps

Open the Settings app and go to Privacy & Security. Then, choose the Photos app and go through all the apps that have access to its photos.

Here, you’ll see the access level for each app. Choose an app that you want to revoke permissions for and switch to None or Limited Access. When you choose Limited Access, you’ll be prompted to select the photos that you do want to provide access to, rather than giving it blanket access to your whole library. Repeat for any apps you want to change permissions for, then tap Done.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you gave an app Limited Access and attempt to access your photo library with it, your iPhone will ask you if you want to keep the current selection, or add more photos. You can choose the Select More Photos option to add more recent photos to the mix.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

You can also always revise an app’s photo permissions at any time from Privacy & Security > Photos > App > Done.

And while you’re already in your Privacy & Security settings, it might also be worth enabling the new Private Access feature that can help you automatically remove location data when you upload or share photos to the selected app.

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