We use many apps on our smartphones everyday almost for everything in our life: to check our mail, to manage our finances, to plan an event, to create to-do lists, to chat with friends and the list goes on and on to include apps that we download to entertain ourselves or our kids and apps we download but never use. Have you ever thought about what these apps can see or share about you? New Website Privacy Grade can help you discover what type of info is shared through any specific app and what it means for your privacy.

Privacy Grade basically assigns rates to common apps based on a formula that takes users’ feelings and expectations into consideration. The privacy protection grades are: A (Excellent), B (Good), C (Fair) and D (Poor). Each grade is given based on crowdsource surveys measuring how users feel about the app’s permissions and what they expect when it comes to their privacy. For example, Dropbox app is rated A which means the app has excellent privacy policy while CNN and Linkedin apps rated B which reflects a certain discomfort by users when it comes to their privacy.

The following information is provided by Privacy Grade for each app in their database:

1. App description and key features

Privacy grade gives you a brief description about the app you searched for as well as the most important features it has.

2. Sensitive permissions used by this app

Privacy Grade lists the permissions taken by the app, what they mean and why the app is using them. Permissions usually taken by apps include access to your network, account, contact list and modifying or deleting content.

3. Third party libraries used by this app

Privacy Grade also shows you libraries used by the app. Libraries are third party social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, mobile analytics and utility libraries often useful to developers not end users.

To my surprise, the majority of popular apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and Google apps are all rated A. According to Privacy Grade, D rated apps are typically mobile games and entertainment based apps such as Fruit Ninja Free or My Talking Tom.

Be careful when using any app, before you even download it, check its rate on Privacy Grade to know how well it protects your privacy.