Privacy Apps For Android To Keep Your Phone Calls and Texts Safe

Privacy is our basic right and something we hold very dearly. Despite the ever-increasing popularity of social media, where we are invited to share our lives with others, we prefer to be in charge of what we let others see.

Taking control of your privacy is not easy in this digital world, but not impossible. All you have to do is have the right tools available and keep track of what digital footprint you leave behind.

Here are a few privacy enhancing apps for Android that that can help you stay on the right track.

RedPhone +TextSecure

RedPhone + TextSecure is an open-source app that lets you make encrypted phone calls to others using the same application. You can still use your default dialer when making calls and the encryption option will only pop up if the app detects that you are dialing the contact who also uses RedPhone application. Why you may want to encrypt your call? The reasons can be various numerous. You may be exchanging confidential business information over the phone, discussing money matters or simply prefer to keep things under the rug after the Snowden scandal. Whatever your reasons may be -they are yours to have and RedPhone’s to keep secure.

The app comes with TextSecure addition, which, as you might have guessed, does the same things for your text messages, exchanged over Wi-Fi or mobile data networks. With data encryption you will be able to send your account numbers or other personal data without worrying about it getting into the wrong hands.

Silent Circle

Similarly to the application above, Silent Circle enables you to encrypt data when using your smartphone. In addition to encrypting calls with other Silent Circle users, the application will also keep your video calls secure as well as allow you to send encrypted files and self-destructing messaged. That’s right! Even if you don’t feel like you’ve got anything to hide, you may well enjoy the pure idea of playing “secret agents” with your friends or re-playing one of the scenes of “Mission Impossible”.

Wickr

Wick is a security app with the focus on messaging in all its formats: text, voice, video, multimedia, etc. Wickr uses a stronger encryption system, that the other featured apps and puts your privacy at the very top of its priority list. With Wickr you can not only encrypt your messages to keep them safe from prying eyes, but also delete metadata, including your location data and texting times.

The app comes with a fun addition – Secure Shredder – which is a tool that will enable you to delete all the attached files, messages and pretty much all sorts of data without the possibility of future recovery.

Spider Oak

Spider Oak is a cloud storage tool that describes its approach to user privacy as “zero knowledge”. What that means is that SpiderOak will not store any of your passwords and all your data will be in encrypted format, all the way from its transit to the point when it’s safely stored on SpiderOak’s servers.

Basically, SpiderOak is a cloud storage solution for users, who find other popular cloud tools unreliable (from the security standpoint) or want to store confidential or private information.

You will get 2GB of storage space for free and will be able to upgrade for bigger capacities at a monthly fee.

 Postman

Postman may not be a straight-up security app, but it is a life-saving one, for sure, – especially of you are constantly bombarded with all sorts of spam. The app promptly notifies you if there are any unwanted messages coming and also comes with an automatic delete feature, which gets rid of all the annoying spam mail, without you having to go through your mailbox message by message. This comes with a great benefit of quickly cleaning up your storage without letting junk sit there for weeks.

And if you think the app has made a mistake by deleting the text from your mother about the upcoming family reunion (or has it), you can easily restore it with a single tap.