Unless you’ve been living under an internet-devoid rock, you have probably noticed the recent uproar over Facebook “privacy.” The social media giant made some changes, with various confusing privacy implications that have everyone panicking. By default applications can access some personal details (that you might not want them to be able to access) simply because one of your friends has used the application. Then there’s the relatively harmless “Instant Personalization” feature, which lets a select group of sites pull profile data to customize your experience…but only if you agree to it on a site-by-site basis. (A lot of people have freaked-out over the new JavaScript widgets as well, even though they’re built entirely on the client side rather than the server, meaning Facebook is the only party seeing the contents.)
The good news is that there’s now an open-source bookmarklet that can scan your profile and recommend tweaks to lock-down your profile a bit, since Facebook’s privacy settings are so byzantine that few have the patience to wade through them. ReclaimPrivacy.org’s script runs a series of tests and gives you a convenient button to fix the problem if you so choose.
