| Mobile app permissions raising privacy concerns among consumers Jessica Smith | November 25, 2015 Want to receive more free charts from BI Intelligence? Sign up here » 
Consumers are becoming increasingly wary of the amount of data and access mobile apps request from them. Sixty percent of consumers have chosen not to download a mobile app and 43% have uninstalled a previously downloaded app after discovering how much personal information the app requested, according to a new report from Pew Research. Developers leverage some of this data to create more holistic, anonymous profiles of users in order to better target ads. And some access must be granted and data collected just for an app or service to function. In order to retrieve access and user information via their mobile apps, developers must send users "permissions" that users agree to. Some app permissions requested are mostly harmless and are required for basic functionality, while others may pose more severe privacy concerns to consumers.
- Pew found that from June to September 2014, 83% of apps in the Google Play store asked for full network access in order to run. This app permission — which is commonly requested to enable apps to connect to the internet — is mostly harmless.
- 54% request the ability to modify or delete the contents of a consumer's USB storage. This permission presents a potential privacy concern because it enables the app to access user information.
- 165 of the 235 different types of app permissions enabled in the Google Play Store are solely used to access the hardware components of a mobile device.
- 70 of the 235 permissions are capable of accessing user information.
And while most apps require just a few permissions, access requested tends to vary by app category. The highest number of permissions requested by any app observed for the report was 127, though the average across all apps is just five permissions. The report also found that of all app categories, those in the "communication" and "business" categories tend to request the most permissions, averaging nine and eight permissions, respectively. Of the ~1 million apps observed, approximately 100,000 apps didn't request permissions at all. 
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