Reclaim Facebook privacy

Want to check how secure you really are on Facebook? ReclaimPrivacy has a little widget that you can drag to your browser bar. Go to your privacy settings on Facebook and click the widget. It'll then check for you, telling you how secure things are:

It was a little dodgy in that I did a rescan without changing any settings and it gave me a different reading, and I couldn't get it to complete the scan, but it's at least another tool in the armoury!

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Comments

[Richard Bachner]

I'm glad that these tools exist, I'm just worried about how privacy is continuing to evolve online. It's bad enough that something like http://www.dirtyphonebook.com exists, but when Facebook is violating users' privacy and Google Buzz is exposing peoples email connections and other large companies are continuing to trend in this direction, I think a sort of sea-change has arrived. Checking out your privacy on these Facebook scanners is a good idea, I just think that more than that is necessary and I'm not sure what.

[walt crawford]

I noticed the same thing--or, rather, something different: After I changed settings in the one area it flagged, I reran it...and it flagged another area as well. Still (somewhat) useful.

[Katharine Widdows]

This may be a silly question - and I do apologise if it is. . .

If you use tools like this to monitor your Facebook information because you are concerned about how safe your data is on Facebook, then presumably you are giving the application access to your data in order to run the checks?

If this is the case how do you know your data is safe with the application you are using?

[Phil Bradley]

On the contrary - I don't think that it's a silly question at all, it's very sensible. You have of course hit the nail on the head - at some point you do need to trust the resource to act honourably in the manner that it says that it will. It's always worth doing a little digging around before trying it out, just to make sure that there's no problems with it.

On the other hand, if you're simply allowing something to tell you what information is public it's not able to delve further into your account - though of course it could find material that you didn't want shared, and you realise that you've shared it with the app itself!

I don't think there's a clear answer to this - at some point there needs to be a leap of faith, and for each of us, where we make that leap will be slightly different.