Check out these free tools that reveal who and what is looking at your Web activity - and what you can do about it.
There’s an app for everything–including protecting yourself from apps. Sure, the cyclical nature of giving something access to your information in order to see what else you’ve given your information to is enough to make anyone think that we’re firmly caught in the Internet’s crosshairs and it’s too late to get out unscathed.
And these aren’t exactly fail-safe options. Electronic Frontier Federation’s activism director Rainey Reitman explains that studies have proven these types of applications only work if you know how to use them–what’s more is that you’re never 100-percent safe. “What consumers need is a simple way to protect themselves online that doesn’t involve finding, installing, and maintaining a slew of third party apps,” she says.
Until that day comes, we think it’s better to educate yourself and get proactive rather than stay complacent. Check out these applications that go under the hood to reveal what’s going on when you’re scouring the Web.
Reppler
Like other applications, Reppler has to be given access to your various social networking sites before it can assess what they are doing to your reputation. And accordingly, it’s going to want to be made privy to what feel like personal details. If you’re able to surmount that mental hurdle, however, you can get a revealing look at what your social sites say about you.
