If you have an Android phone, you have a Google account and unknown to you, or perhaps known but forgotten, apps can access your personal information. Stop them from your phone now!

Some apps installed on your Android phone or tablet can access information about you through your various Google accounts. Apps, extensions and add-ons used with various Google services, like Google Docs for example, may also have access to your account details or even emails. Websites you sign into with a Google account have access to some information too.

Which apps can do this and what are they accessing? You can find out and if you are not happy with them having access, you can then block them for extra privacy. This can be done on the web, but let's take a look at how to do this on an Android phone.

Are you the sort of person that doesn’t take much notice of privacy issues and happily lets all and sundry access your personal information. Do you really not care who can see your details or do you just not realise that you can control who has access to what? I suspect it is the latter and people simply are not aware of what apps are accessing and how they do it.

There are some useful features in Android that show which apps have access to personal information and you can even see what they have accessed. Permissions can be revoked and the apps can be blocked from accessing your personal information.

Recent versions of Android

1 Google in Settings

Open the Settings app on your Android phone. There are several versions of Android in use and menus and settings may be slightly different on your phone. Commonly used versions of Android have a Google section. Press it.

2 Google services configuration

We will focus on two sections in the Google account settings, Ads and Apps Connected. First press Ads.

3 Opt out of personalisation

Advertisers love to gather information about people and use this to create profiles for them. This data is then used to target you with personalised adverts. You cannot stop the adverts, but you can prevent advertisers building a profile or using your activities by enabling the switch.

4 View connected apps

Return to the Google services configuration (step 2) and press Apps Connected. This displays a list of apps that have access to information in your Google account. This can happen when apps, extensions and add-ons are installed and a permissions window popped up. Who reads them? Many people just click OK without thinking and they just want to get to the app they installed.

Are you sure you want all these apps accessing your Google account? What can then access anyway?

5 View app permissions

This is an example of an add-on to Gmail which enables Asana to be used from within your inbox. It can access a lot of information, including all your emails. However, this is necessary in order for it to work.

Are there apps, addon-ons and extensions with access to your account that you either do not recognise or do not use anymore? If there are, tap them and then tap Disconnect. This cuts the link to them and they can no longer access your information.

It is important to revoke access to anything not being used or not wanted to limit the people that have access to your personal information.

Old versions of Android

Let's take a look at how it used to be done, just in case you have a very old version of Android. As of May 2019, 25% of Android phones are still using Android 5 or 6.

All the information about which apps have access and to what is in the Google Settings app. Go to the all-apps screen and tap Google Settings.

It is pretty much the same as with more recent versions of Android from here on. In the Google Settings app, tap Ads and Connected apps as before.

Global changes

One thing to bear in mind is that this is a global Google account setting and it is not specific to the phone. You are changing your Google account settings everywhere. Some of the apps listed may be used on other Android devices, such as a phone or tablet. Some apps might even be used on the computer, such as Chrome web browser extensions and software, like Backup & Sync or Google Docs. Take care what you disable.

I would suggest looking at this list occasionally, seeing what is there and removing apps that don’t need to be purely for privacy and security reasons. It isn’t actually a major privacy or security issue, so don’t immediately panic when you see all those apps listed. Just tidy up the list every now and then.