Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

ReclaimPrivacy.org has a handy bookmarklet that shows which potentially insecure and privacy-invading settings are enabled on your Facebook account when you click it.

ReclaimPrivacy’s bookmarklet focuses on just a few key areas where Facebook can share information with the public—having your contacts, connections, and tagged photos exposed to the public, as well as allowing your friends to accidentally expose that information themselves. It also looks at your relationship with Facebook’s personalization, applications, and other aspects to see what Facebook and independent developers can find out about you, then rates your exposure level in simple Good, Caution, or Insecure levels, along with offering links to change those settings.

ReclaimPrivacy Bookmarklet Rates Your Facebook Exposure Levels.

This ragtag group of dudes below may look like the WB’s version of Entourage, but actually they’ve set out to take down facebook and return privacy controls back to the users.  Their idea is simple, but they need your help.

How it works and their vision -  Instead of you posting an update to facebook and then facebook pushing that status to all of your friends (centralized solution), they believe social networks should act more like real people do. They believe you should be able to send out a status and directly interact with your friends on your own, without having to give facebook access to all your personal information.  They call it Diaspora and it’s essentially a decentralized hub that gives you full control over your identity online.  They believe offering this service will be helpful to non-technical users who are worried about their data and privacy online.

How you can help – Go check out their page at Kickstarter and make a pledge.  You’ll only be charged if the project actually gets fully-funded, but as a backer you actually get a piece of the project as well.  A pledge of $5 gets you a version of the software that you can run as your own server.  Of course, bigger donations get you greater access to the project and more freebies.  Signup is simple and donations work with your existing Amazon account.  You’ve really got nothing to lose…except your privacy. Support Diaspora.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.