How to Protect Your Online Accounts by Revoking Access for Third-Party Apps
From time to time , an app such as Unroll.me has come under the spotlight to remind us that we all tend to give multiple apps access to our email and social media accounts without much hesitation. Sometimes, as with Unroll.me, these apps sell our data. Now is a good time to audit any other third-party apps that you have granted access to your accounts.
Many web applications these days ask for access to a different account. Sometimes this is because they are adding something to that service, and sometimes just because of a service called OAuth , which gives the application access to an account using a token. In any case, the whole point of the system is that you can instantly revoke access to a third-party application with just a few clicks. This makes it easy to audit and get rid of any random apps you try during the day and then forget. If you don’t remember the application, the application is free and you don’t understand the business model, or it just doesn’t seem familiar to you, it’s a good idea to abandon it. So let’s go ahead and do a good old audit.
Go to the page for the apps connected to your account (profile picture> My Accounts> Login & Security> Connected Apps and Sites> Manage Apps). Click on the applications for which you want to revoke access, click Remove, then click OK.
Microsoft
Go to the Apps page (Accounts> Privacy, then scroll down to Apps & Services). Click Change next to the app you want to remove, then click Remove these permissions.
Yahoo!
Go to the Manage Apps and Websites Connections page (click your profile icon> Account Information> Recent Activity), then click Remove next to any apps for which you want to revoke access.
Funnily enough, Flickr has its own page for this, the ludicrously named App Garden. Go to the App Garden page (click your profile> Settings> Sharing and Extension, then click Change next to your account links), then click Revoke permission? next to any apps you want to uninstall.
Aol
Go to the Site Permissions page (go to MyAccount > Account Settings> Manage Site Permissions), then click Remove for any apps you want to block access.
Go to the app page (Settings> Apps> App Settings> Show All), hover over the app, then click the X to uninstall the app. Since this is Facebook, you’ll have to do this individually for each app, and the list tends to get awkwardly rearranged every time you uninstall the app.
Go to your Apps page (Profile Picture> Settings & Privacy> Apps), then click Revoke Access for any apps that you no longer want to access Twitter. For some reason, these apps will hang there for a few minutes, allowing you to revoke access revocation if you change your mind.
Go to the authorized apps page (click the gear icon> Authorized apps in the web app, for some reason you can’t do this in the mobile app). Click the Revoke Access button for all applications you want to remove.
Go to Allowed Services (Profile> Account> Partners & Third Parties) and click Revoke next to any services you want to remove. Chances are, most of them will look a little odd to you because they have fancy names for recruiting sites like iCIMS or Greenhouse.
Dropbox
Go to the page related to applications (profile icon> Settings> Security). At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of all apps you’ve shared with Dropbox. Click the X next to each one, then “Remove” to remove it. This was my personal worst offender on this list as there were about 20 apps that I never bothered to uninstall here.
It’s easy to lose sight of every app you’ve connected different accounts to, so while it might seem like a silly process, it’s really worth doing it every few months.