Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

Security

A social networking privacy experiment

SecurityEdward Kiledjian

All too often, people forget to secure their facebook profile page and then post stupid self deprecating comments that site can easily scoop up and archive forever. This may be a good time for you to read my post on securing your Social Media information found here.

We Know What You’re Doing is the brainchild of an 18 year old web programmer who wanted to show the world just how stupid people can be. Using the publicly available Graph API, his site collects interesting updates and categorizes them into one of these categories:

  • Who wants to get fired?
  • Who's hungover?
  • Who's taking drugs?
  • Who's got a new phone number?

 

Click on the above image to maximize it.

Why should you worry?

Governments and companies datamine these sources of public information using techniques called Open Source Intelligence. Since it is based on publicly available information, they don't really need your permission and you would be surprised at how much information can be gleamed by a trained analyst.

My advise to you is simple, if you wouldnt want your husband/wife/mother to know about it, don't post it on the internet because the internet never forgets.

 

Take 2 minutes to secure your social media information

SecurityEdward Kiledjian

If you are like most social media users, you grant [app] access to your account way too easily and probably have dozens, even hundreds of apps with read and write access to your accounts.  Take a second and think about what this means for your online privacy (or lack thereof).

The tool

Tech entrepreneur, Avi Charkham, faced the same dilemma and was frustrated by how much time it took him to locate the account permissions pages for the 8 most popular social media sites (often taking 5 clicks or more ).  But unlike most users, he decided to do something about it and create a cool and useful site called Mypermissions.org. His site links directly to the privacy pages of the popular social media sites which means you can review and secure your pages within minutes (instead of hours).

The site currently supports:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Linkedin
  • Dropbox
  • Instagram
  • Foursquare
  • Microsoft Windows Live
  • AOL
  • Flickr
  • Familio

New Tools

The site now has two more ways to get and stay secure:

  • MyPermissions Cleaner, the site describes as “Automatically scan your apps permissions, Get alerts when apps access your private info and remove them all in one click.”
  • MyPermissions mobile app for iPhone which helps you while on the go.

Conclusion

I use IFTTT to automate some of my social media tasks and have configured the service to email me a monthly reminder to check my permissions. I can’t stress how important it is to keep your permissions clean and updated. I will write an article shortly about a site that mines status updates from public facebook profiles and publishes their embarrassing content on its site for all to see.

 Link: Mypermissions.org

Governments are requesting more user info from Google

SecurityEdward Kiledjian

Google geeks and privacy advocates love Google’s “Transparency Report” (now in its 5th version). In the latest version, it is interesting to note an upward trend of requests Google defines as “troubling”.

An interesting new feature is the ability to see aggregated court orders and other requests worldwide. To add some meat to this discussion, consider the fact that from July to December 2011, governments requested information on 28 562 user accounts. This number includes requests for user information and takedown requests for blog posts and videos. Of the 6321 US Government requests, Google auctioned at least 90% of them.

Just remember that nothing you do online is private and you'll be fine. 

A review of SocialFolders

SecurityEdward Kiledjian
With over 900 million registered Facebook users, social networking is now a now a household term. You are likely to hear a teen talking about it as a grandmother. These sites are an excellent way to keep in touch and share your life with others. 
Whether you are dealing with the established 800 pound gorilla or a new technology company freshly out of their “garage”, you should start to think about locally backing up your social life. Think of locally backing up your social information as “social life insurance” in case your networks of choice get bought, shut-down or dramatically change their business model.

Enter SocialFolders

SocialFolders is a neat little fermium app that allows you to map your social network connections to your local computer, thus allowing you to keep a local backup of your digital data plus it makes it much easier to upload data to these services. 

Getting started is easy, you head over to their website , create a free account and download their software. Once downloaded and installed, you right click on the system tray icon and choose Connect to my services which takes you to their online account page where you choose one of the supported services, provide your credentials and choose what it is you want synchronized.

The Pro features

The main reason you will need to upgrade to a pro account is the 3000 file or 3 connected services limit for free accounts. As soon as you hit one of these, you have to move to their affordable $9.99 annual subscription model.

The switch takes minutes and is as simple as configuring an additional service.

Verdict

I love the idea and think SocialFolders has a great model but there are some things I don’t like:

  • They only support one account per service. If you use multiple Google Docs accounts, you will only be able to sync with one of them. Support says this is on their roadmap with no ETA.
  • High traffic sites not yet available as connectors. As an example, I have a Dropbox account I would like to sync using this tool but Dropbox/Google+/Skydrive is not yet available. Support says this is on their roadmap with no ETA.
  • For photo sharing sites, I wish they offered more granular control (like those offered by the site). As an example with Picasa, SocialFolders allows me to set the default privacy of new folders to Public or Private but none of the sites sharing options are enabled through it (sharing through a link, etc).
  • I am an active Evernote user and was stocked about the ability to download my files as a local backup but… as an Evernote users with thousands of note and attachments, I was surprised to learn that it downloaded the attachments only and organized them based on the notebooks they were in. I wish it offered the ability to sub-categorize based on tags (my primary Evernote organization tool).

Overall I love the idea and think it can become a solid solution to the social networking data dilema. The only question is: will they be able to develop the product fast enough? With other entrants getting into or looking at entering this market (Gladinet, etc), they have a short window of opportunity to develop the product and gain marketshare or crash & burn.

I recommend testing out the free version and keeping my caveats in mind. If these are things you can live with, then go ahead and buy it.

 

 

 

Popular journal app Path uploads your personal contact information without notice

SecurityEdward Kiledjian

Well well… another day, another security issue with a popular mobile app. This time the culprit is a popular life journal app called Path.  Arun Thampi discovered that Path uploaded his entire address book (names, numbers, emails) to Path without his prior consent. Arun highlighted the fact that the app never asked for permission to upload this type of sensitive info to Path.

Path’s founder and CEO responded to Arun:

“We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and [efficiently] as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path.”

The CEO went on to say that a recent update for the Android version asked for permission to upload the address book (but it still was not done opt-in style). IOS users still don’t have the luxury of deciding. Regardless of what the company says from this point on, it will be seen as a reaction to the discovery rather than a real genuine interest by Path to inform its user and allow them to intelligently decide on what to do with their information.

In recent weeks, I had been testing Path and will discontinue its use based on this new information. Companies have to learn that being upfront with their users is critically important and that protection of personal data is paramount.