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Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched
- mjpizz 16y agoalso, 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)
- dschobel 16y agoI'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).
- mjpizz 16y agoright 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 :)
- pinko 16y agoThis is really quite well-conceived and executed. I just sent in my donation. Thanks so much.
- MPiccinato 16y agoNice and useful, thanks
- oliveoil 16y agoThe 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-to-stop-doing-now-on-facebook 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??
- mjpizz 16y agothanks! 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.
- nnash 16y agoYou can remove all of your boxes and delete the likes/interests facebook generates for you by clicking the delete button next to the avatar for the page.
- twir 16y agoIn 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."
- atlbeer 16y agoBrillant tool and quite easy to use. My only suggestion is the "auto-fix" button, can you give me a preview as to what settings your application is going to change?
- mjpizz 16y agogreat suggestion. Maybe a screenshot on mouseover? I'm trying to watch bandwidth at the moment though. Originally I made the scanner walk through each step and show what was happening, but it was too flaky.
- dacort 16y agoI second this. At the very least, link to somewhere where you describe what changes were made (and how to revert if I so choose).
- hussong 16y agoCongrats on the launch, and enjoy the ride!
- sounddust 16y agoThis 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 see the list of public ones so that I can manually untag myself. Similarly, it would take too long for someone with thousands of wall posts to find the ones that might have accidentally been set to "everyone". I think that it might have been better to wait until these were included before officially launching the tool, because the photo issue affects almost everyone on Facebook, and if people use this tool and everything checks out ok, they probably won't return again if you update it later.
- mjpizz 16y agoI 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 http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy
- jakarta 16y agoAwesome job -- I think this will be a great service when you add photo privacy checks. Among my friends, that is usually their biggest concern.
- tokenadult 16y agoI 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.
- klochner 16y agoThe 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.
- tokenadult 16y agoMy 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.
- wvenable 16y agoI'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)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mjpizz 16y agoI doubt you're the only one - thats why I made the source code completely open: http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascripts/privacyscanner.js#L6242 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]
- thorax 16y agoFor 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.
- mjpizz 16y agodone. I left the compressed version deployed for now, but the source code is now 100% uncompressed and commented: http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascripts/privacyscanner.js#L6242 http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/blob/master/javascri... thanks for the feedback, esp about the PARTNER_APPS constant (now called BLOCKABLE_APPS for clarity)
- MikeCapone 16y agoThis is great. How long until facebook tries to block it?
- nnash 16y agoGreat bookmarklet, I thought I had made everything private but it looks like I missed a few settings. I shared this on facebook. Thanks.
- adamengst 16y agoI tested setting all my contact information privileges to Everyone and then re-ran the scanner, and it still claimed that my settings were good, which doesn't seem right. Might want to look into that, since I think a lot of people would tweak a setting, re-run the scanner, and see how it changed. I'd also suggest that you post a human-readable list of the assumptions that the tool makes, since providing source code isn't particularly user-friendly for non-programmers. cheers... -Adam C. Engst, TidBITS publisher
- aw3c2 16y agoWant a german translation?
- mjpizz 16y agoabsolutely, fork it and contribute :) http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy
- aw3c2 16y agoShall I just make a german version of the whole thing (the strings humans see, not the debug stuff) or do you plan for internationalisation (argh, what's the word) support? Don't do it just because I might do a translation, sometimes I lose interest in things. ;) edit: It's mostly the htmlContent array and lines with the word "message" in them, correct? I don't know Javascript.
- mjpizz 16y agoyes, that is pretty much all of the content. Probably easiest to copy it into a variable called "htmlContentInGerman" or something, and then translate it. I'll figure out how to switch languages later on. Thanks for helping!
- theycallmemorty 16y agoOut of curiosity, is this a violation of Facebook's terms of use?
- bshep 16y agoIANAL, but it's not a facebook app so it should not need to follow Facebook TOS. There might be trademark or other issues though. I'm glad it's opensource ( in case they get a take down notice ).
- theycallmemorty 16y agoI just figured they wouldn't appreciate it because it 'harvests' data from facebook... in the same way they didn't like that firefox extension that converted the email address images into plain text.
- bshep 16y agoI can see it going either way. If they hate it, I'm sure they'll try to block the script somehow. Either by changing stuff on the page or by threatening legal action. If they love it (they might see it as a way to re-gain the trust of their user...), they might integrate it into their page. Either way, as I said previously, I'm glad it's out in the open, that will prevent them from disappearing the project.
- catch23 16y agoIt's a bookmarklet though, which means it's all client side javascript, which will make it pretty hard to block. It's basically a greasemonkey extension, and if you look at all the GM extensions available on userscripts.org, there are some that do pretty crazy things and are usually updated on the same day the site owner changes something that causes the script to break.
- Rabidgremlin 16y agoNice work. If you don't want to drag a bookmark into your browser then check out this FB privacy checker: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy which I created over the weekend...
- ube 16y agoNeat tool - thanks for creating it. One question - when I run it on my account there are 2 scans that never seem to return (it keeps saying "scanning"). The scans are: - scanning personal information... - scanning friends, tags, and connections information... Is there something on my end I need to do? (I tried running the scanner multiple times and its on Mac firefox 3.5.9)
- mjpizz 16y agodefinitely, glad you like it. That bug seems to be a problem periodically, looks like somebody already filed it on the issue tracker: http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/issues/#issue/2 http://github.com/mjpizz/reclaimprivacy/issues/#issue/2 if you know any Javascript pros who could help, point them at the source code :) Hopefully get some patches tonight.
- mrcharles 16y agoIf you are serious about people getting to use it, consider putting the source directly on the site, along with comments suitable for the layman. I'm sharing this link and having people say "But what if it steals my info!" and while I can tell them it's open source and they can look at the code themselves, that's not something the majority of my friends can do.
- sun 16y agoVery useful. Thanks for the post.
- mcdowall 16y agoThis tool rocked! I thought I was pretty closed out with my privacy but was insecure on 2 elements, all sorted now! good work!
- Daniel42 16y agoSame thing for me! Thanks!
- paulsmith 16y agoI shared this on my wall and encouraged my friends to try it, and got a few responses that might be useful feedback for you as you improve it. Basically, it was too hard to use. :-) I had to post very simple, step-by-step instructions as a comment to walk them through it, even down to the "click on the link and hold, then drag the mouse to the toolbar and let go" level. Several of them also didn't realize you needed to be on facebook.com to use it -- they tried just clicking the bookmarklet link on the original page. The kind of people who can most benefit from a tool like this -- i.e., not the elite geeks who probably already have awareness of FB's privacy issues and how to address them -- need extremely straightforward, "don't-make-me-think" instructions to gain value from it. These people aren't stupid -- they just don't have the same intelligences we have or assume others to have.
- mjpizz 16y agoyea I had the same sense - thanks for that feedback. Maybe a screencast? I don't have much time to do a screencast at the moment, but if anybody makes one I will gladly post it up :)
- justlearning 16y agowould it be long before facebook comes out with their privacy-blocking tool. They may be anticipating many tools with these features, so doing accordingly? as a thought game; I foresee facebook coming up with their claim-n-search-your-privacy app, which they would use to strengthen the privacy game. :)
- hsmyers 16y agoLovely 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?
- omnivore 16y agoUsed 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.
- mjeason 16y agogreat work. nice open source project.
- pacemkr 16y agoI 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.
- thyrsus 16y agoThe 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.
- up_the_irons 16y agoThe campaign owner has not "accepted" any of the pledges, so Pledgie is not getting an IPN from PayPal.