XPrivacy - Xposed Framework Module

About XPrivacy

In  earlier post, I had explained about Xposed Installer and OpenPDroid. The former explaining about modifying your ROM without modifying an APK or flashing a custom ROM, and the latter explaining about protecting your privacy and providing fake or null information to the apps that access your private data.

Now, today I'm going to explain about a combination of both Xposed and OpenPDroid. Yeah, enter XPrivacy module for Xposed Framework.  Wondering what is it?

I am going to explain about it in a minute, read on..!!

XPrivacy can be used as an alternative to OpenPDroid, though not as restrictive as OpenPDroid can be, but still is a great option for those who cannot patch their ROM to run OpenPDroid. XPrivacy can be used to prevent applications from accessing your private sensitive data.

XPrivacy does this by providing an application with null or fake data.

XPrivacy does not block the permissions of an application, it just provides the application with fake data, hence there'll be no problem of a particular application getting force closed because of using XPrivacy.

If providing fake or null data to an application causes problems in working of an application, then the same can be reversed. By default, all newly-installed applications will not be allowed to access any data, so that any new application cannot leak any sensitive data after its installation. After every application installation, XPrivacy will prompt to ask for the data you want the application to have access to.

As the developer of the XPrivacy module says, XPrivacy will monitor attempts made by all applications to access sensitive data. XPrivacy will highlight (with a yellow triangle) a data category for an application (or an application name in the application browser) as soon as data of the data category has been used. XPrivacy will also display if an application has internet access, indicating that the application poses a risk of sharing the data it obtains with an external server. If an application has requested Android permissions to access data in a data category, it will also be displayed (with a green tick), but this will only be shown when looking at an individual application, since checking permissions for all applications is quite slow.

XPrivacy is built using the Xposed framework. XPrivacy taps into a number of selected functions of Android through the Xposed framework. Depending on the function, XPrivacy conditionally skips execution of the original function (for example when an application tries to set a proximity alert) or alters the result of the original function (for example to return empty calendar data).

Installation of XPrivacy

1.    Requires Android Jelly Bean (4.1 and above) and rooted phone.

2.    Requires Xposed Framework installed.

3.    Download XPrivacy and Xposed fix for your Android version from  here.

4.    Enable XPrivacy in Xposed Installer > Modules tab.

5.    Reboot into Recovery mode.

6.    Flash Xposed fix for the version of Android.

7.    Reboot your phone.

If you have any queries, feel free to comment.!!