Can apps access your gallery without you knowing?

G-MAN2004 · 4 Sep 2019 at 17:06

Let's take Instagram for example. You give it permission to access your gallery because of course when you try to add a picture, it will need to access the file system in order for you to upload one. That's fine. But can someone at Instagram look through your gallery without you even knowing? Can they see every single picture you have whenever they want, or can they only see the pictures at the point of upload?

I was just curious about this and can't seem to find a definitive answer online.

Edit: on Android

Deleted member 77746 · 4 Sep 2019 at 18:02

They wouldn't be allowed to do this, if someone found that they where spying without the users knowledge I bet there would be uproar and sued big time. This goes with all apps now.

Squink · 4 Sep 2019 at 19:14

mrbell1984 said:
They wouldn't be allowed to do this, if someone found that they where spying without the users knowledge I bet there would be uproar and sued big time. This goes with all apps now.

“They aren’t going to do it because there’d be uproar if they were found out” doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone else hijacking data.

Deleted member 77746 · 4 Sep 2019 at 19:18

mulpsmebeauty said:
“They aren’t going to do it because there’d be uproar if they were found out” doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone else hijacking data.

Yeh, well they not supposed too whether or not they do it. If this become public they would get fined doesn't matter what company it was.

Kenai · 4 Sep 2019 at 19:35

I would have thought from a permissions based perspective then yes in theory, as once you grant an app a particular permission, it retains that permission until you specifically remove it. This means that the app can access your gallery at any time it's running.

As for the practicalities of whether Creepy Dave the pervert software engineer at Instagram HQ is looking at your naked selfies - I very much doubt it.