Facebook Privacy Blunders Spark Launch Of Transparency Apps

Facebook's privacy blunders networking

One such tool is a privacy scanner, available at reclaimprivacy.org, a bookmark tool designed to take a holistic scan of Facebook users' profiles for privacy holes and alert them to places where their personal information can be exposed.

Thus far, users still are required to fix the privacy holes themselves once they're discovered, but the application's author said that will change down the road, according to Wired News.

Additionally, an independent firewall and spam filter vendor called Untangle released a tool called SaveFace, which resets Facebook profile information, such as wall posts, images, interests and activities, to the "friends only" setting.

If users want to see the damage Facebook has inflicted on other members, they can now apply the tool Openbook, which lets them peruse through potentially embarrassing status updates made public by using the "everyone" setting. The "everyone" setting literally enables status updates and profile information to be accessed by search engines such as Google or Bing.

In recent months, Facebook has elicited a firestorm of complaints from privacy rights groups, legislators and users after revamping some of its policies that exposed users' information by default. In recent months the site launched privacy settings that exposed users profile information, including, personal data, friends' lists and images, on public search engines. Most recently, the site battled with privacy advocates regarding the advent of its "instant personalization" feature, which automatically linked their supposedly private interests and activities for their profile pages to public Websites.

While these tools might go far in helping remediate some Facebook privacy holes, many are designed to be used after the fact, when damage to privacy has already occurred.