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How to see if your Facebook apps are snooping on you

How to see if your Facebook apps are snooping on you

By Riva Richmond, New York Times | Updated: 5 June 2012 01:59 IST

Highlights

So you’re a pro at Facebook’s privacy settings and controlling how you share personal information with friends. But are you as savvy about what you share with companies?

So you're a pro at Facebook's privacy settings and controlling how you share personal information with friends. But are you as savvy about what you share with companies?

If you use third-party applications on Facebook to play games, post pictures and share content from other services, you're probably supplying plenty of details about yourself -- and your friends -- to the makers of those programs.

But how do you separate the good from the bad when there are a couple hundred thousand apps, made by tens of thousands of software developers, who are asking for more than 50 different types of Facebook data? And how do you know if the 47 apps you've installed are OK?

Luckily, there are two new free tools that can give you the skinny. One is Social Monitoring from Unsubscribe.com, a company that helps Internet users get off e-mail lists. And the other is a new feature of uProtect.it, a Facebook privacy app from Reputation.com, which is best known for managing people's online images.

Both tools are browser plug-ins that will scan your Facebook account to see what apps you use, score their privacy levels and help you delete any apps you don't want to keep. Social Monitor works on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and uProtect.it works on Firefox and Chrome. Both are developing Internet Explorer plug-ins.

The two tools both do the core job of assessing what data an app has permission to access, ranking those permissions based on intrusiveness and serving up an analysis that places apps on a scale of high to low risk. They both flag apps that want permission to access your data at any time they wish, not just when you're using the app, or want sensitive things like permission to access messages in your private inbox.

The idea is to tackle the problem that many Facebook users install apps without fully understanding the privacy implications of the data permissions that apps request. "They're just clicking OK because they want to play the game," said James Siminoff, chief executive of Unsubscribe.com.

The tools also respond to the fact that some app makers appear to ask for excessive data. Of course, many, if not most, app makers are reputable businesses that handle user data responsibly and, per Facebook's instructions, access only what they need to supply their service. But not all deserve your trust or are behaving so well.

Some apps -- like those shady quizzes and surveys that promise prizes -- appear to exist solely to gather personal information valuable to marketers. Facebook says it reviews apps, requires them to have privacy policies and uses automated systems and spot checks to find violations of its policies. It says it has disabled thousands of violators.

The tools each take slightly different approaches. To start, Social Monitor displays its assessment of apps on a "dashboard" within its own site (you can also check apps you use on LinkedIn and Twitter). UProtect.it takes up residence within Facebook, adding a green bar at the top of the page where you access its features. Clicking on a question-mark icon triggers a box with the app information (it plans to release a Twitter product soon and tackle other platforms, too).

Social Monitor offers a juicy piece of information: application developer reputation. Its employees investigate developers and assign them reputations of good, warning or bad. To do so, they try to figure out what developers are doing with user data and look for signs of trouble like lawsuits and whether it's easy to contact the developer.

Mr. Siminoff said they've been unable to locate or contact two of the top 10 developers on Facebook, who together have direct access more than 150 million people and almost all of Facebook through their users' friends. "They know who you are, but you can't find out who or where they are," he said.

Social Monitor also issues recommendations about whether you should remove an app based on privacy level, developer reputation and how long since you've used it. If you haven't accessed it in 90 days, it recommends booting the app to limit unnecessary sharing.

UProtect.it does not consider developer reputation. However, its privacy ratings take into account whether a certain app is likely to need certain data, a sensible function. For instance, a dating app wouldn't get dinged for wanting access to your relationship status.

Also, uProtect.it lets users disable certain permissions requested by a given app, in addition to deleting it altogether. Social Monitor said it decided not to offer this functionality because Facebook users might get frustrated if apps didn't work anymore. UProtect.it hopes in the future to be able to tell users that a particular app needs, say, only five of the 10 permissions it has asked for to function well.

Reputation.com chief executive Michael Fertik said he hopes tools like uProtect.it will gain followings and push app developers toward better privacy practices. "Too much of social technology depends on the ignorance of the end user, and step one is education, sunlight," he said.

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