Pierow’s Prattle

My Permissions is a free web service that links directly to the application permission management pages on eight social networking sites. (Such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Linkedin, Dropbox, Instragram and Flickr)  Click on the link and it opens the app settings control panel of the selected service in a new tab.  MyPermissions.org makes it easy to find the otherwise difficult to locate privacy settings that often go unaltered.

[http://mypermissions.org]

• Delete All Your Tweets with TwitWipe [Webapps]

Reddit had an interesting post on removing yourself from online public information search sites.  In part:

“Thanks to LawyerCT for bringing this topic up on /r/technology. She also provided a list of the top sites online that hold data on you.”

Intelius.com* – Opt-out

Acxiom.com – Opt-out

MyLife.com – To request that a Member Profile or Public Profile be deleted, please contact Customer Care at 1-888-704-1900 or contact us by email at privacy@mylife.com. Upon receipt of these requests, and confirmation that you are requesting that your own profile be removed, please allow MyLife 10 business days to complete this removal. It may be necessary to contact you to validate that you are the profile owner requesting the removal. This is to ensure the correct identity and profile ownership before completing these requests, and is for the protection of our users and their privacy. (more…)

“Lightweight Portable Security (LPS), created by the US Department of Defense, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.”

[Unixmen]     [http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm]

[Download the LPS-Public ISO image, version 1.2.2 (16 July 2011)]

“If you have been troubled by recent revelations that your cell phone can be used to reveal details of your personal life, this item will probably boost your concern level. It turns out that there is actually a commercially available device specifically designed for sucking data out of your handheld. In fact, Cellebrite Ltd. (www.cellebrite.com) has just released Version 2.0 of its Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), designed to provide “law enforcement and government intelligence agencies with new capabilities for improved extraction, retrieval, and analysis of mobile phone data.” (more…)

Facebook remembers everything that has ever been posted to your wall.  It’s a very cumbersome task but you can actually scroll back through all of the history on your wall by manually clicking (and waiting).  You can also remove the posts from your wall by clicking the ‘X’ to delete each and every individual post.  Sound time consuming and boring?  It is.  Enter Clean My Wall.  (more…)

Chrome extension Move2Picasa migrates all your photos from Facebook to Google Plus.  Install the app in Chrome, fire it off and let it run.  =)

“Google Plus uses Google’s Picasa Web Albums (soon to be renamed to Google Photos) as the backend for Google Plus photos, so in order to migrate your Facebook photos to Google Plus, you’re actually moving them all to Picasa. With Move2Picasa, that process is extremely simple.”

[Move Your Photos Chrome Extension]

Security researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden revealed today that the iPhone and iPad 3G regularly tracks the location of your iOS device and records the co-ordinates along with timestamp in a hidden file.

Allan said in a post on O’Reilly Radar:

“Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. ” (more…)

Zeroing or “wiping” the data on a disk is a practice that makes data on a disk less recoverable.  This does not ensure that the data can not be recovered but it certainly makes data recovery more complicated.  It is always a good idea to wipe a disk prior to donating or retiring a computer to help protect confidential information.

This procedure will erase all data on the disk and make it difficult to recover – needless to say, you should backup any important data prior to using this procedure.  Also note that this only applies to standard hard drives.  Solid state drives require special handling as noted in this post. (more…)

In January Facebook announced that it would support encrypted connections via HTTPS.  You should definitely enable this option if you use Facebook from public Internet access points (think Starbucks).

To enable this feature, log into your Facebook account, select “Account Settings” from the “Account” menu on the top right.   Under “Account Security“, click the change button and check the box that says “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible” – then click “Save.”