There are plenty of legitimate reasons to grant an app access to your camera roll – for example, a printer app, or an app that creates photo albums, or an email app. But, as Lifehacker points out, if you’ve clicked through to grant full permissions to new apps without thinking about it much, or aren’t sure which apps even have permissions it might be time to head into your iPhone’s settings menu and audit which apps can access all of your images.
More and more these days, there are incidents where OCR-equipped malware can access your photo galleries and convert images of text into machine readable formats. This kind of malware searches a device for pictures and screenshots of passwords or personal information which it then sends back to hackers who can then use this data in their attacks.
How to change an app’s photo permissions in iOS
If you don’t know what apps have access to the thousands of images that you have on your phone or iCloud account, it’s time to check on that. First head to Settings > Privacy & Security > Photos. You should see a listing of all the apps that have permissions with an access level listed next to each one.
There are three tiers of access available for apps: None, Limited Access or Full Access. While “None” clearly provides the app with no access to your photos, “Full Access” provides unlimited or unrestricted access. Meanwhile, “Limited Access” will show you prompts that allow you to select which photos you want to give an app access to.
When you give an app Limited Access to your photo library, your iPhone offers an option between keeping the current selection of photos or adding more. Should you wish to change an app’s permissions later on, you can do that at any time in the same place by tapping the access level next to the app in the settings menu. This gives you one more level of privacy over your photos and an added level of security against any potential malware.
You should also make sure that if you have any images in your photo roll of sensitive information, such as driver’s licenses, insurance cards, or crypto wallet passwords, to either delete them or move them to a special application protected by a password.
