This app could help you regain control of your data

Keeping track of the personal data your mobile apps are collecting, using, and sharing requires making sense of long, ambiguous, and often confusing privacy policies and permission settings. Privacy Assistant, a creation of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, uses machine learning to give users more control over the information that the apps on their Android phones collect. It combines a user's answers to several questions (for example, "In general, do you feel comfortable with finance apps accessing your location?") The app is available only for rooted devices, meaning their operating systems have been unlocked to allow for unapproved apps. But Norman Sadeh, a computer science professor who leads CMU's Personalized Privacy Assistant Project, hopes that a major tech company will eventually see the technology as a way to differentiate itself from its competitors, and pave the way for it to become a mainstream tool.