A method and an apparatus provide for operating a user interface of a device to receive from a user, for individual ones of a plurality of user privacy categories, a user privacy setting; to map each user privacy setting to one or more device sensors to form a sensor policy for the user privacy category; and to monitor application program accesses to device sensors to detect a violation of a sensor policy. An aspect of the exemplary embodiments of this invention is the user interface that can represent privacy levels of each application program to the user in a “user-friendly” format. Another aspect of the exemplary embodiments is to provide the user device with an ability to detect and act on or at least report privacy violations by the application programs.