Privacy on Windows 11: Know when apps access your microphone, camera, or location


Windows 11 now comes with a feature similar to iOS’s App Privacy Report, called “Privacy Auditing”. It presents a history of each application’s access to sensitive devices such as your microphone or your location.

Section Privacy and Security Windows 11 Settings will soon show recent activity for apps that have accessed microphone or other sensitive data (like location) in the past week. The report will include the time and date the app last accessed the device.

This new feature has been highlighted last week on Twitter by Dave Weston, Microsoft vice president of enterprise security and operating systems. “The new privacy audit features in Windows 11 allow you to see the history of access to sensitive devices, such as the microphone,” he said then.

Do as on iOS

According to Bleeping Computer, Microsoft added the privacy and transparency feature in a preview version of Windows 11 released in June. It is currently available for testing in the Dev Channel – the less stable release channel with features that may or may not be generally released.

Microsoft is taking inspiration from Apple’s iOS and iPadOS 15, released last year. The iOS Privacy feature shows when and how apps access location data, photos, camera, microphone, and which domains apps have communicated with in the last seven days. The iOS App Privacy Report can be enabled in Settings, under Privacy, in iOS and iPadOS, but it is not available on macOS.

This is a neat privacy feature that seems more obvious for mobile devices that people carry around on a daily basis, but it can also be useful for laptops that people take home and to work.

The currently available version of Privacy Auditing logs when apps have accessed location, calls, messaging, and screenshots over the past week.

In iOS, users can click each item in the list of apps in the report to navigate to the domain name the app accessed and when it did so.

Source: ZDNet.com





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