For Thursday’s New York Times, I wrote a Tool Kit column about ways to protect privacy on Facebook. Since I wrote the article, I’ve discovered two new tools (via Twitter) that are aimed at Facebook users concerned about their digital footprints.
One is called My Permissions, and it tells which Facebook aplications have access to what kinds of information. When I tested it, I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I did find it revealing. My Mitt Romney campaign app had permission to post status updates in my name. Two music streaming apps had round-the-clock access to my information, even when I wasn’t using them. The presentation is simple. The app can be installed on your browser of choice. Harper Reed, chief technologist for the Obama 2012 campaign, spotted it a long time ago. My bad for not noticing it until now.
The second, Scrambls, is designed to let the user decide who can read what. It encodes â€" or locks with a key â€" what you post on Facebook (or what you send through Gmail for that matter) and lets you choose who should have the key to be able to read it. A friend of mine, for instance, posted pictures of a house he is renting out. He posted several pictures and offered a pretty good idea of where it’s located. Had he been worried ab! out a break-in into a clearly unoccupied house, he might have encoded it for a set of friends only.
Clearly, as our lives move online, there is a growing marketplace of stuff to help us manage the crumbs of personal information that we scatter out there, sometimes unknowingly.
