Embodiments of the present invention disclose a privacy protection method, a mode switching apparatus, and a terminal device. The method includes: receiving an input operation of a user; identifying the input operation and extracting an action feature; performing matching in an instruction library according to the action feature, and when the matching succeeds, generating instruction information corresponding to the action feature; determining a protection mode of the terminal device according to the instruction information, and determining an application that subscribes to the protection mode in the terminal device; and controlling display of the application according to the protection mode of the terminal device.