Concerned about your Facebook App privacy?

Then worry not. And if you weren’t worrying, then you should have been. Why? Well you’ve most likely at some point installed an app and lackadaisically ignored the permissions you’ve granted it, only to completely forget later on. When you do, you may shrug the privacy concerns as a one off and carry on about your business as normal. Before you know it you’re overloaded with a bundle of apps hidden away on your Facebook profile that could well be extracting and posting your information elsewhere.

The good news is there’s a tool called MyPermissions. It’s not an app, so it won’t read and require permissions to use, instead, it acts as a bookmark which will direct you to your apps pages. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram and Flickr are all covered by the website, which will lead you straight to your app permissions page of each respective account.

You may actually be surprised by the amount of apps you’ve given permissions to, and you could argue that in some cases you have to give away too much just to be able to use them (just as you are forced to ‘Like’ something on Facebook you may want or need, but don’t necessarily ‘Like’ – yet). In fact, with the increasing merger of applications and social networks I’m surprised there hasn’t been a greater enquiry into the extent of privacy concerns in that domain specifically. While there has been significant coverage on Facebook privacy settings, I feel there needs to be a closer examination of blurred information loopholes present in applications connected to social networks – sooner rather than later.