With everyone wanting to maximize our ‘social graph’ when it comes to either building our real estate business or our personal brand, sometimes that can come with a price: privacy. Being that most everyone reading Geek Estate is on Facebook in some capacity, I wanted to share this with you tool with you – Facebook Privacy Scanner.

Like it or not, with critical mass comes targeting. With targeting comes spam and with spammers come fraud.

To that end, with the slew of recent facebook privacy changes, we need to make sure that our profiles are accessible to the level that we want them to be – not some default setting that fb decided was right for us.

For me personally, I try and lock things down, that’s just my choice. You might be different, but that is what’s right for me. Well, I thought I was pretty locked down but after running the Facebook Privacy Scanner tool, I was alerted that my friends could actually share my pictures and other data pretty easily via third party apps. Say What? I thought I had locked all that down. Looks like I hadn’t.

This is what the Facebook Scanner tool alerted me to:

facebook_scanner

From there, I was able to click the ‘fix’ link and I corrected the settings inside my facebook privacy settings.

Some of you might want full and complete open access to your profile, pictures, content, etc. so that it’s indexable and accessible to the entire planet. Or, you might want to really restrict what data is shared and not shared accordingly.

No matter which side of the fence you are on in relation to data privacy, Reclaim Privacy will alert you to what level of data sharing with the world (either on purpose or inadvertently) you’re currently distributing into the social abyss.

Special thanks to Shane Pike for alerting me to the Reclaim Privacy open source initiative. I hope it’s as helpful to you as it was to me this morning. 🙂

Here’s to locking down your data to the level that you want.

Cheers, Matthew

Related Articles:
7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Facebook Privacy Scanner