Facebook Privacy Breakthrough: Reputation.com's CEO on uProtect.it ...

uProtect.it, a new application from Reputation.com, enables users to restrict who can see their data on Facebook. David Kirkpatrick tracks down Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertig in Davos for more details on the tech bombshellâ€"from its implications in revolts like Tunisia to whether it’ll be banned by Facebook.

A new application on Facebook gives users, for the first time, ironclad control over the data they post on the social-networking site.

uProtect.it, as the application is known, has not been announced by its creator, the small security company Reputation.com, but was reported in The Wall Street Journal’s Digits Blog on Monday. I ran into CEO Michael Fertig Tuesday night in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, where Reputation.com, formerly known as ReputationDefender, has been honored as a so-called Tech Pioneer, one of a small number of startups so designated each year and given a chance to attend the Davos conference. Fertig was excited about the potential of his new application, which enables users to carefully restrict who sees their status updates, photos, or videos, and which he says remains in the early stages of development. The Journal appears to have forced him a bit out of the closet, and he told me more about the product and its potential.

Giving full control over the disposition of a user’s content on Facebook into his or her hands is likely to be very popular. While Facebook itself offers a variety of privacy protections, its controls are often difficult to use, and it is by no means always clear who will or won’t see a supposedly protected item. As the author of a history of the company called The Facebook Effect, I speak to audiences regularly about the impacts and future of Facebook. The issue of how to retain control over personal data never fails to emerge with any audience. And having just spent four days in Germany, I can attest that concern over this issue prevails there in public discussion over almost all other aspects of Facebook. Germans fear having a company deciding what happens to their data.

Separately, giving users fuller control of their Facebook privacy seems even more important in the wake of the recent popular revolt in Tunisia, which was fueled largely by activism on Facebook. As articles like The Atlantic’s about Tunisia note, human-rights activists are increasingly asking Facebook to make provisions to protect people who speak out against repressive regimes on the service. Facebook refuses to allow people to use pseudonyms, so speech under our own names requires close control. uProtect.it could give activists control so local secret police would not be able to see what they were saying on Facebook, as they now routinely seek to do. “You want to help the guys in Tunisia?” asks Fertig. “Here’s your tool.”

“This is the delete button for the Internet,” says Fertig. Users can even schedule certain posts to expire at a specific time.

Once users install the uProtect.it Facebook application, they can select to use it sometimes or always. If I do so, the status updates or photos I post will initially appear to my Facebook friends as only “David made a protected post.” If users have the application installed and they are allowed by the poster to see the post, then it becomes readable. If they don’t have the app, they see a link that enables them to download it. If they install the app but aren’t on the sender’s list to view the update, they remain out of luck.

Source : Google blogsearch