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Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

reclaimprivacy.org

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Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#11

Post by mjpizz »

sounddust wrote: post #6

This is great, but two things that I would really like to know about my privacy on Facebook are 1) which photos I'm tagged in that are publicly visible (even if I have elected not to display tagged photos to friends), and 2) which wall posts are accidentally tagged as everyone. Those photos are indexed by Google and contain my name, even if I have chosen not to share photos I've been tagged in. I want to be able to s…

I completely agree with you about photo privacy, and I was hoping to keep it soft-launched while I added photo and wall-post privacy checks (my free time is limited). Lifehacker and RWW wrote about it this morning though, so not much of a choice.

Facebook is constantly changing this stuff though, so I'm hoping that the Facebook page and Twitter announcements will keep people up-to-date and re-running new privacy checks.

Source code is open, think you might have free time to help add some of those checks in tonight?

http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#12

Post by tokenadult »

klochner wrote: post #10
tokenadult wrote: post #8

I see friends' settings reported as insecure, and then asked the application to fix that, but those settings are still reported as insecure. Some more documentation on what that's about would be interesting to me. Thanks for the great external links on your site. A very interesting application that I immediately told all my Facebook friends about.

The scanner appears unable to change those settings. If you click the link (left of "fix this") you will be able to change the settings manually.

My page view may be nonstandard, because I zoom in on most pages to favor my presbyopia. I don't see the link "(left of 'fix this')" to which you refer, and would appreciate tips on what manual changes to make in my own Facebook settings. Once you update that on your website documentation, I'll be sure to deep-link my friends to those same tips. Thanks.

P.S. Friendly general advice for web developers who use JavaScript elements that display on webpages: TEST those for users who have different font size settings or zoom settings to favor their own vision issues, lest links or other elements of your design overlap and become unreadable.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#14

Post by jakarta »

mjpizz wrote: post #11
sounddust wrote: post #6

This is great, but two things that I would really like to know about my privacy on Facebook are 1) which photos I'm tagged in that are publicly visible (even if I have elected not to display tagged photos to friends), and 2) which wall posts are accidentally tagged as everyone. Those photos are indexed by Google and contain my name, even if I have chosen not to share photos I've been tagged in. I want to be able to s…

I completely agree with you about photo privacy, and I was hoping to keep it soft-launched while I added photo and wall-post privacy checks (my free time is limited). Lifehacker and RWW wrote about it this morning though, so not much of a choice. Facebook is constantly changing this stuff though, so I'm hoping that the Facebook page and Twitter announcements will keep people up-to-date and re-running new privacy chec…

Awesome job -- I think this will be a great service when you add photo privacy checks. Among my friends, that is usually their biggest concern.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#15

Post by mjpizz »

dschobel wrote: post #9
mjpizz wrote: post #2

also, a lesson: enable capacity billing on your AppEngine account ahead of time , you never know when you're going to wake up in the morning and find out somebody launched your project :) luckily AppEngine made it really easy to spring back, so it should be fine now (hopefully donations cover costs)

I'm happy to donate money towards hosting costs; any intention of posting those numbers? (assuming you're not launching this as a money making venture).

right now I'm not sure what the numbers will be - AppEngine's estimate is currently fluctuating a lot because of the big traffic draw.

Haven't decided about other things that might make money in the future (maybe a Diaspora node?), but I fully intend to leave the current Javascript scanning functionality open and free :)

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#16

Post by mjpizz »

wvenable wrote: post #13

I'm I the only one a little wary of scanning for privacy by logging into Facebook and then injecting someone else's scripting code into the page? (Edited for the pedantic)

I doubt you're the only one - thats why I made the source code completely open:

http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascri...

The only compressed stuff is jQuery javascript, all other Javascript is uncompressed and commented. Hope that helps.

[edit: updated line number]

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#18

Post by oliveoil »

The tool's great! Let's hope you have not collected all my data when I ran it.

I also checked out this link on your homepage: http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109538/7-things...

It says leaving your full birth date is not recommended (identity theft). So I went to the info page and clicked "edit information" but instead of having edit boxes on the Info page facebook recommends me to convert are my movies, music, colleges itc. into a pages (so they can track it better.. or make it more unified?). It's very hard to navigate away from that page (for a normal user anyway) and when you select nothing and click save they threaten you there's going to be none of the information in those sections on your profile (wow! now I'm scared!). Seriously --- it's becoming worse and worse, how can they be so disrespectful to their users, how can they not fear losing them??

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#19

Post by mjpizz »

oliveoil wrote: post #18

The tool's great! Let's hope you have not collected all my data when I ran it. I also checked out this link on your homepage: http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109538/7-things... It says leaving your full birth date is not recommended (identity theft). So I went to the info page and clicked "edit information" but instead of having edit boxes on the Info page facebook recommends me to convert are my movies,…

thanks! The scanner definitely does not collect your data, privacy policy pasted below for clarification

------

Our privacy policy is not long:

* we never see your Facebook data

* we never share your personal information

Simple. The scanner operates entirely within your own browser.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#20

Post by thorax »

mjpizz wrote: post #16
wvenable wrote: post #13

I'm I the only one a little wary of scanning for privacy by logging into Facebook and then injecting someone else's scripting code into the page? (Edited for the pedantic)

I doubt you're the only one - thats why I made the source code completely open: http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascri... The only compressed stuff is jQuery javascript, all other Javascript is uncompressed and commented. Hope that helps. [edit: updated line number]

For the source code, I wouldn't include the compressed jQuery if possible. Speed isn't as important here as transparency and it's quite difficult to scan to tell whether there are any issues. I know you don't want to take up a lot of room with jQuery but it really will help increase my ability to recommend to others if all the code is easy to read.

You might also want to put comments on slightly scary things like PARTNER_APPS to be sure people don't believe Yelp are YOUR partners or something crazy like that.

Some of these things sound paranoid, but I'd like people to feel 100% comfortable using your bookmarklet.

It worked great for me and identified some things I missed somewhere. Nice work.

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