Provide Fake Data To iOS Apps Requesting Personal Info Access [Cydia]
A few days back we covered ContactPrivacy, a Cydia tweak for jailbroken iOS devices which notifies users every time an app tries to access their iPhone contacts. One couldn’t help but feel that there is a lot of room for improvement in this sort of a tweak, and that’s exactly what Protect My Privacy is all about. Not only does this Cydia app notify you when an app accesses your address book, but there are notifications for just about any sort of data access, including media on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. That’s just half of what Protect My Privacy does, the app will even fill in random fake info in areas of apps where it is necessary to provide some private specifics. Some people might consider this tweak sort of immoral, but in fact it just gives users a choice to control their personal data.
Protect My Privacy is available in the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store as a free download. Once installed, it will appear as a standalone app icon on the Springboard of your iDevice, titled PMP. Initially the app is blank from the inside, but it is supposed to fill up once you start launching privacy infiltrating apps. Whenever an app which requires access to contacts, or any other personal data, PMP will display a push notification warning the user. You can either Allow the app to access the data, or you can choose to Protect it. By protecting, you will be able to proceed with the usage of app in an ordinary fashion, but at the backend, PMP will provide fake data on your part. The app even lets its users specify the data they want to be provided (otherwise random info is fed to the suspicious app). Once an app has been protected, it will start appearing in the Protected Apps column of PMP. You can change its status, or any other parameter, by going to its dedicated menu and editing the fake data. This means that Protect my Privacy can also be used if you want to spoof some fields, while providing accurate data in others. Protect My Privacy can prove to be a really useful app if you are privacy conscious, and it won’t cost you anything to download it. ContactPrivacy is for users who just want a basic security measure for their iPhone, while this tweak (P M P) is there for advanced users.
