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Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

reclaimprivacy.org

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51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#51

Post by twir »

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,…

In the spirit of due diligence I started up a debugging proxy before I ran the scanner, so that I'd be able to tell if it collected any info.

Happily, it seems the only requests made are to fetch the javascript that does the scanning, and to various Facebook pages and associated content such as Facebook's CDN and "channels."

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#52

Post by hsmyers »

Lovely idea! That said, it failed on 'Instant Personalization' and 'Friends Share'--- spotted the problems displayed the fixing message, then the scanning message only to revert to the warning message...perhaps some sort of info on how to do it by hand if the attempted fix fails?

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#53

Post by omnivore »

Used it earlier and got the link from someplace other than here. Great tool, useful and should be great for people to use and help others with it as well. I'd been wary of Facebook's wacky features before all of the hoopla began, so I didn't have to change much but...I know lots of folks who just won't think about it. Well designed and easy to view, too.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#55

Post by kunley »

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)

Yeah that reminds me of recent ismycreditcardstolen.com story. They wanted to warn, they ended up accused of phishing themselves.

Looks like spreading distrust is a double-edged sword (not that I don't share authors pov on Facebook; I do)

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#56

Post by pacemkr »

I can't help but think that this is completely ass backward. If you are worried about your privacy, close your FB account.

Facebook is not a necessity or a utility, it's still just a free service. I disabled my account years ago for privacy reasons. Unsurprisingly, I haven't lost a single connection or friendship that mattered to me. Facebook is not what facilitates relationships, its people. I'm really baffled by the extent to which people go to stick with this service when they clearly are concerned about what FB is doing to their privacy.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#57

Post by rmc »

lambdasigma wrote: post #27
mjpizz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Yes, but the bookmarklet only contains one line of code, which fetches the remainder of the script from your server. So you could possibly replace it at any time with something evil... Sorry for being paranoid. I very much like your initiative, but people are going to ask questions about these sort of things.

Shame there isn't a way (in HTML) to say "the src of this is at http://.... and it's SHA512 is a5872... or it's signed by GPG key 0x1276e...". That would solve that problem.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#58

Post by thyrsus »

The pledgie tool is either v e r y slow or misbehaving; it shows 0 pledges even though there are believable comments that there are more than that. pledgie took my e-mail address, but I haven't gotten anything from them yet.

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#59

Post by sosha »

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]

How can I tell the code running on the server is same as the code you posted on Github?

Re: Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched

#60

Post by mjpizz »

sosha wrote: post #59
mjpizz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

How can I tell the code running on the server is same as the code you posted on Github?

for any of the Javascript/HTML/CSS, you can just diff it with the GitHub code to be certain. Also, the backend Python code cannot do anything sketchy with your Facebook data since nothing is done using Facebook's API. And you have my word that I am doing my best to deploy to AppEngine after modifications are made in GitHub. I'm even considering putting up a postcommit hook when I have time.
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