Data Detox Day 6: App Cleanse

For day six in the Data Detox Journal, the main goal was to do an app cleanse of our phones. First, I was asked to guess how many apps I think I had on my phone and I guessed 55, but when I counted them, I found out I had 75 apps including the ones that come preloaded on my phone. Since I have 75 apps that number is considered high exposure of data collection meaning that more and more companies have access to it. Second, was the actual app cleansing. I was asked to go through all of my apps and ask specific questions to myself to help determine which ones should stay or go. Some examples of the questions were “do you really need it?” and “When did you last use it?”. I found I was able to delete a few apps that I found were unnecessary or apps that I no longer used. Then it explained how you can go into the privacy settings on our phones for each app and change the privacy so that it is not using up more data than it needs to function. Lastly, there was a section about alternative apps that don’t make money off of our data, so I decided to look into them and maybe try a few out. I was able to convince my sister to use Signal with me to try out the messaging system and I was surprised that it worked pretty well.