Privacy is set to be a major battleground on the Internet over the next few years. It’s important to keep track of what is being said about you, and that is something which is becoming big business – with the leaders in the field including German social network security firm secure.me.
Now the Munich-based company has made it easier for users to be more proactive in safeguarding their online privacy with App Advisor. The new app reputation service lets you see which apps you should be more concerned about when it comes to protecting your personal data BEFORE they become a threat to your privacy.
It is the latest step for secure.me, which was founded four years ago and now has almost 200,000 monthly active users. It recently overtook Bitdefender to become the number one Facebook security app.
With App Advisor, users can search for the app in question or browse by name, category, permission or developer. The idea behind it is to combat the growing tendency to simply click ‘agree’ whenever a request for permission pops up. According to secure.me, seven of the top ten grossing iOS apps and six of the top ten Androids apps have integrated with Facebook.
Social apps linked to your FB profile can track what you and your friends get up to – locations, behaviour and who you interact with. This leads to a ‘data halo’ accumulating around you which the apps get to see to as soon as you give them access to your Facebook account, regardless of your privacy settings.
App Advisor help you to see which apps will be a problem before you allow them access. It is available on a website or as a browser extension for Safari, Firefox and Chrome. With the extension, users will be warned as soon as a new app is connecting with their Facebook profile, whether it’s on FB or elsewhere on the Web.
In terms of apps, SoundCloud and FourSquare both do well, being given a ‘high reputation’, while TripAdvisor, for example, has a ‘very poor reputation’ – needing critical permissions such as user locations and checkins.
Mario Grobholz, secure.me co-founder and CEO, told Silicon Allee: “It’s notable that app providers have been able to collect users’ most sensitive data without any regulations so far. With App Advisor, we want to build an industry authority for app security – a transparency center app developers will have to embrace when creating their apps, ultimately providing a higher level of user protection.”
The new service officially launches on Wednesday but can already be accessed.