deprinfo

It is quite common nowadays to see a website asking you to create an account to use their service. For example Spotify, Pandora or less famous ones like https://iconsflow.com. Most of these websites/web services allow you to log in through facebook/google so that it is easy for you and you need not remember yet another password. This is amazing, we always prefer this form of login/signup.

Similar to us, If you also use facebook or google to login, have you ever wondered how much of your information from facebook can be accessible by these services? This information could be really sensitive like: Your friend’s list, your groups, your posts, birthday, interested in..so on and so forth.

To get a sense of it, login to your facebook, go to Settings -> `Apps and websites’. Here you can see all the Active apps that are using facebook to access your information.

You can click on the View and edit button to see the exact information, the corresponding web service is accessing.

Note that, you can disable these permissions. Most of the apps work fine when the not required permissions are disabled.

This could be annoying if you have a lot of apps and you don’t know which information is needed for the service to work. To make it easy, we created a small Chrome and Firefox extension. This extension helps you to selectively prevent one or more app to access your private information.

We are also conducting a study to understand the extent of this problem. For which, our extension anonymously collects your app names and private information requested by each app without any of your information. We even hash your user id to make sure that there is no way to identify you.