From the course: Windows 10 Essential Training

Set app privacy and permissions

From the course: Windows 10 Essential Training

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Set app privacy and permissions

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- [Instructor] In Windows 10, the first time you launch some applications on you're computer, you may see a question like this. This application is asking for my permission to access my location data. And there are some other types of permission that apps might ask for. This permission and the privacy issues they are here to protect is what I want to talk about in this movie. Now my computer can identify its physical location based on its internet connection. It's a great a useful feature, but you should stop and think about whether you want this specific application to be able to access that data. Do you trust the app? Why does it need that information? And so on. And other apps may ask to access your computer's camera or your address book data. Lots of other things. So first, just answer these questions as best as you can when you see them. I do want this application to access my data, so I'll click yes. But later, if you want to change that answer or if you just want to get an idea of which apps have been granted various permissions, you can go into settings. So I'll go to the start menu, click on the gear button to go to settings, then I'll go to the privacy category. Here, in general, there are some options for targeting advertisement that you might want to look at, but I want to scroll down and focus on these sub-categories under app permissions. Lots of categories for different features of your computer that applications might want permission for. Let's start with location. So there are a few global options to disable location data entirely on your computer or just set it so that no app is able to access your location data. But most people leave both of those options turned on, then scroll down a bit, and then you can see a list of all of the applications on your computer that might want permission to access your location data. You can turn this permission on or off for any of these apps one by one whenever you want. If you turn it off now for one of these apps, then you launch that app later, it may ask again for that permission and you can always say no at that time. So location is just one example. You can browse through the rest of these sub-categories on the left and consider what your apps are able to use. Let's take a quick look at camera. So which apps can turn on and see through your computer's camera can be a major privacy concern. So again, you could disable the camera completely. You could set it that no app is able to access your camera, or you can just scroll down and check that application by application. So the settings for each of these generally work the same. Now it is worth noting if you go to something like calendar or contacts, disabling the master switch does not disable your address book on your computer. It just makes it so that other applications cannot access and use the contents of your address book. Now finally, there is another way to look at these permissions. I'll go to the start menu, and I'm just going to choose an application. Let's go with a camera app. I'm going to right click on it, go to more, and there's an option here for app settings, which will show up for most applications. So here we can see some important information about this application, including which features of your computer that it has permission to use. So you could go to a specific app like this, then enable or disable the permissions that it has. For example, if you want to use the built-in camera app to take picture, but you don't want your location data to be saved to those pictures, you can just disable location right here. At the very least, you should be aware of when apps ask for permission, and to be more careful, I think it's worth a few minutes to check these settings.

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