Usually third party applications are harvesting your personal information for personal gain, not protecting it. But a Facebook app called uProtect.it will shield your social media activity from everyone – including the website itself.
UProtect.it is the creation of Reputation.com, a website dedicated to trolling the Internet to define and defend your name. The app isn’t all-encompassing, however, as it only protects your own comments and posts from unwanted eyes. It allows users to select which of their friends are privy to updates, and those lucky few will be redirected via a link to posts. Basically, your own Facebook activity is stored elsewhere, but you can use the site to distribute them how you see fit.
“Essentially you’re creating an encrypted atmosphere on Facebook, and Facebook can’t control it,” founder and CEO of Reputation.com Michael Fertik told The Wall Street Journal. While the app restricts your visibility to Facebook, like all apps, it reaps your data for itself. Users must relinquish personal information as well as be comfortable with the fact that those posts they’re obscuring from their Facebook friends’ eyes are being vacated to Reputation.com’s servers (which, of course, the company asserts it protects).
It might sounds only occasionally useful, but with hype surrounding privacy protection, the free app will most likely find favor with mildly paranoid users. More significantly, though, those with a distrust of Facebook might like the fact that the company doesn’t have access to their activity on the site. There are plenty of people who minimally use the social network, yet feel the need to maintain an account.
Perhaps the strangest thing about uProtect.it is that it publicly informs everyone that you’ve made an encrypted post. Because if something says unsuspicious, it’s totally a public statement that you’re trying to keep a secret…on Facebook.
