Featured Android App Review: Privacy Manager [Tools]

Privacy is a major buzzword these days and sometimes you want to be able to keep and/or do things on your phone that you don’t want others to know about. You will find plenty of apps that help you in this regard, but most of them only do one thing. What makes a great app is one that is not only simple to use, but also offers a lot of features, and Privacy Manager offers both. Privacy manager will do some of the simple stuff like keep certain pictures, apps, and contacts private, but it offers so much more. Privacy manager will also block certain numbers from calling you, disguise calls or SMS messages when you don’t want others to know exactly who is calling you, Ring your phone with a fake call when you need to be “interrupted” in a meeting. It even offers a password manager and let’s not forget the ability to record from your phone’s handsfree microphone. Privacy Manager has pretty much everything you could ever want, and then some.

The interface is very simple, straightforward, and easy to get to what you want. All the features are part of the main screen and divided into three sections. Under Lock Privacy Information you will find the Image Locker, App Locker, and Password Manager. The Disguise Private Information area has Disguise Call and Disguise SMS. Lastly, the Tools section includes Fake Call and the Recorder. You will also find a quick link to your Private Space as well as quick stats on how many calls and SMS messages were blocked.

Private Space – This is where you can keep any SMS messages and calls that you don’t want to be seen by anyone else. You will be allowed to choose the password for this feature and once you add a contact, it will ask you if you want to move all current SMS messages and call logs for this contact. It so happens that this is the one area that I found to be a little buggy. Current text messages were properly secured, but any future messages sent to my phone from the protected contact would cause Privacy Manager to error out and result in those texts to go unprotected. This is something that will probably be fixed very shortly.

Blocking – You can block certain numbers from calling or texting you. You can add people to either a blacklist or a whitelist by number, contacts, SMS log, call log, or SIM card. You will also find numerous settings for fine tuning things. For example, you can block text messages that contain a particular word. You can also set it to only block calls or only SMS messages. The main page of the app will always show you how many calls and SMS messages were blocked.

The blacklist is obviously for those that you want blocked, but the whilelist feature is also very important. The whitelist are those contacts that you will always accept and can be quite useful. Lets say you are going to bed, you can change your settings from blacklist to whitelist so that only the really important people will be able to wake you up. In other words, all other contacts (including anybody in the blacklist) will be blocked.

Image Locker – This is pretty self explanatory. You can select whatever images on your phone you want to be hidden. This area has it’s own separate password so you can make it the same as the others or completely different. If someone goes to your gallery, they will not see the image(s), and it will be as if they never existed. The only way they can be seen is from the app, and the person would need the password to access it.

App Locker – This works the same way as Image Locker, but the only difference is the apps that you lock will still be visible on the phone. In order to open the app, the user will need to enter a password that you set. Just like Image Locker and Private Space, this password is independent. You can choose to make it the same or completely different.

Password Manager – I always tell people to use not only use more secure passwords, but also different ones for each site or account. The only problem with that is remembering all of them. This area will keep all your account usernames and passwords for easy access. You will find options for BBS, Game, IM, Email, Bank, Others. Again, this area has its own password that you can choose.

Disguise Call and Disguise SMS – This gives you the ability to spoof who is really calling or texting you. Say your wife might call you in a meeting, but you don’t want others to know that you will be talking to your wife. When she does call, you can make it so it shows a completely different phone number for the incoming call screen. The same goes for SMS messages.

Fake Call – We have all been in situations in which we wish someone would call us because we really need to be interrupted. Fake Call will do that. You can set this caller to call you at whatever time you want and you can even prerecord their spoken words. You can make this caller someone from you contacts or any number of your choosing. The only issue is that if it’s from your contacts, it doesn’t grab your contact image for further embellishment, but it gets the job done.

Recorder – You can set your phone to record the surroundings at any particular time that you want using your phone’s handsfree microphone. You will obviously need to have it out of your pocket, and it works very well. The only issue is that you can’t preset how long you want it to record for, so you are going to have to remember to stop it on your own. All recordings will be saved in the privacy recording box for future reference.

As you can see, Privacy Manager does so many things which makes it very appealing. You can grab it for $4.99 in the Play Store, which has all the features I mentioned. They do offer a Lite version for Free that offers all of the features I mentioned, but you are limited to 10 images for the Image Locker and only one contact for disguising calls and SMS messages . These limitations aren’t all that much, and I suspect that most people can get by with this lite version.

Check out my hands on video below as well as the download links to get started. As always, let me know what you think.