Want a free at-home workout? Just let the FBI read your phone

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is worried about you being stuck at home. So much so that it wants to help you with your daily physical fitness.

To that end, they’ve developed an app called the FBI Physical Fitness Test app. It is designed to show you how to properly do exercises such as pushups and situps.

The FBI website says this app will help you “train like an agent,” as well as go through the full FBI Physical Fitness Test with the latest FBI scoring system.

Nifty.

So let’s just go to the app store (Apple here and Google here), click download and then go ahead and approve these permissions ...

Oh. That’s quite a list to approve. Let’s see here, clearly the FBI, in order to help you do basic physical fitness, needs permission to access your location, and obviously your photos, media and files. And storage. And ...

Wait. Hold on. Let’s take a slightly closer look.

The FBI needs to know your approximate and precise location to use alongside your device’s accelerometer for “a more realistic PFT experience.” Oh, and for your photos, media and files? The Feds just want to be able to read the contents, and, you know, modify or delete those contents.

The app also has an “other” category in which your friendly neighborhood special agent says they will be able to receive data from the internet, view all of your network connections, have full network access, control the vibration capabilities of your device, prevent your device from sleeping, and read any Google service configurations you may have.

There’s also a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print that says, “Updates to FBI FitTest may automatically add additional capabilities within each group.”

Personal trainers don’t typically know so much about their clients, but I guess the Federal Bureau of Investigations has a better idea of what we need to work out. Why aren’t these so-called trainers trying to get access to your device and all of your personal information and location? Psh.