Tommystorm

I received an email from Facebook telling me about the “New and improved” privacy features they were adding, and recently when logging in, was prompted to take action on setting my privacy settings.

Then my friend Sue showed me this article: Privacy Advocates Slam Facebook . I was shocked to read that when your friend chooses to use an application that your friend is giving away to that application’s system all personal information about you that your friend can see. WTF? This isnt a new thing either, Facebook’s application policy has been like this forever.

Ok so i went to revisit my privacy settings today. Imagine the horror when i saw what my current settings are for applications:

So basically, if one of your friends installed one of those sketchy, annoying, add-on apps into their facebook profile, they are giving that same sketchy application (THAT YOU DECIDED ALREADY WAS SKETCHY AND DIDNT WANT FUCKING WITH YOUR PROFILE) full access to your profile.

I don’t know about you, but i don’t delegate decisions like this to my friends. As much as I may love them.

Wow.

I stumbled on this article on makeuseof.com about five web services that offer you one degree of separation between web services and your personal identity. Very useful stuff.In summary:

1. Mintemail – random email address.
2. Numbr – random phone number to you can use to forward to your real one.
3. BugMeNot – disposable username/password for annoying sites like nytimes.com that make you register to read (and see their adds =/ )
4. FakeNameGenerator – Creates a totally random identity. Kinda amusing too.
5. File.io – upload and share file/s (via password-protected URL) for 30 days. Once 30 day period is over, all shared files will be automatically deleted.

The full article ishere.