Site offers one click testing for what access permissions have been granted to 16 of the top social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare, Aol, Windows Live, and Familio.
One of the increasingly popular ways for sites to expand their presence on teh web is to ask users to login with their credentials from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Third-party sites like to have access to your Facebook account, for example so they can publish your browsing history and “likes” on your wall for your friends and family to see, expanding their advertising reach. The same is true of Twitter whereby their tweets magically become your tweets, announcing to the world that they ought to “check out this video” or “this article.”
It gets even more complex when we use smartphones and tablets to access these same sites, and over time the apps that we have granted permission to access our personal information grows larger and larger without our knowledge.
My Permissions is a site that tries to remedy all that by allowing users to verify what apps have permission to access their private information in a single location. Users can verify app permission to 16 of the top social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare, Aol, Windows Live, and Familio.
And it’s easy-to-use. Within less than a minute I was able to clear away unknown apps from the four social networking sites that I use, and was surprised at what sites did have permission to access my accounts. Long forgotten were old smartphones, deal saver sites, and a few that were unrecognizable and potentially the most harmful of all.
Using the site is as simple as clicking on the icon of one of the social networking sites listed, logging into that site, and verifying what apps should have permission. Revoking access only takes a click of the mouse.
Twitter alone had over a dozen apps that had been granted access to my Twitter account, 4 of them being old smartphones. It’s now down to only what I think are essentials.
For additional centralized management of your social-networking sites don’t forget to check out Bliss Control. The Web-based app simplifies dashboard control of multiple social networking sites by aggregating settings into a single, easy-to-use, Web interface.
Stay tuned.
[email protected] | @jaredmoya
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
