Telecom regulator Trai on Friday questioned the practice of mobile applications seeking permission to access data they do not need for their functioning and asked people to read the terms and conditions set by online platforms carefully before agreeing to them.

“There is an application which is actually a lighting application, a torch application. When you download the application, it asks for your contacts, camera and all of your peripherals. Why?” Trai chairperson R.S. Sharma said at the India Mobile Congress here, expressing concern at data misuse by online players.

“For making your mobile phone a torch, why should it require access (to) all this?” he asked.

Sharma said that people accepted the terms and conditions of online platforms without reading them, thus putting their privacy at risk.

“If you have read the agreements that many tech companies ask you to sign before you subscribe to their service, if you carefully read them, they are essentially saying that they will be able to do pretty much everything that they like to do with your data. Essentially, you have given away your privacy by subscribing to those platforms, unfortunately,” he said.

Sharma, who played a key role in setting up Aadhaar, said the government’s unique identity project had privacy protection built into it since its inception.

“Aadhaar is a number. By looking at Aadhaar, you can’t determine gender, age.… In public things you must ensure security…. In private, you must also protect individuals and customers from unnecessary misuse of data,” Sharma said.