Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched (opens in new tab)

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)

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??

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)

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 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.

Brillant 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?

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.

Out of curiosity, is this a violation of Facebook's terms of use?

Want a german translation?

I 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.

Neat 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)

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.

This tool rocked! I thought I was pretty closed out with my privacy but was insecure on 2 elements, all sorted now! good work!

I 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

Nice 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 which I created over the weekend...

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.

If 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.

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.

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?

This is great. How long until facebook tries to block it?

Great bookmarklet, I thought I had made everything private but it looks like I missed a few settings. I shared this on facebook. Thanks.

Congrats on the launch, and enjoy the ride!

would 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. :)

Very useful. Thanks for the post.

Nice and useful, thanks

great work. nice open source project.