Apps
Jumbo is a new privacy assistant for your social accounts
Elephants never forget, but they can help you erase.
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Okay, listen up. We all know that being on social media carries a certain amount of risk when we post parts of our lives online. That shouldn’t come at the expense of shady privacy practices or hidden settings that you don’t even know you can set. Jumbo wants to de-mystify the privacy settings for social media sites, enabling you to post in (relative) safety.
Currently, you can adjust 30 Facebook privacy settings at one tap, save your old tweets to your phone before deleting them, erase your Google Search (who hasn’t wanted to do this at least once?), and even clear the repository of queries on your Amazon Alexa account. Clean-up features for Instagram and Tinder are in the works too, so you can double-tap or swipe right with impunity in the future.
Sounds like a pretty good app to me, although I’ll have to wait to see as the Android version isn’t yet available. If you’re an iOS user though, you can jump right in as the startup has just published it on the App Store. With the constant stream of news about social media sites abusing our data, isn’t it about time that you clawed some power back?
With the lengths that some social sites go to hide privacy settings, being able to one-tap to secure your postings is great
don’t know how long the methods that Jumbo uses to manage your social accounts will last though, as the platforms have a vested interest in keeping as much data as possible open and usable for advertising.
It’s entirely possible that the API calls that Jumbo makes might get blocked in the future, as we’ve seen recently with YouTube blocking automatic actions on Gleam.io, or Google tweaking the Gmail APIs, making multiple IFTTT recipes stop working.
Jumbo-size my privacy
Lockdown Facebook:
Jumbo uses a non-orthodox method to connect to Facebook, opening a mini-browser that you log in as normal, instead of Facebook Connect, which might cause issues if Facebook decides that method isn’t kosher. Once connected, Jumbo then lets you choose from Weak, Medium, or Strong feature levels for your Privacy settings. If you already have some privacy settings locked-down, choosing Weak won’t lower anything you manually set already.
Without Facebook having an API to change settings, Jumbo essentially acts like you on the site to turn settings on. It emulates a browsing session, tapping on the relevant buttons to change your privacy settings. Jumbo founder Pierre Valade hopes that Facebook will provide API access to these functions at some point, so the app doesn’t have to do this workaround.
Spring clean your tweets:
Once connected to your Twitter account, Jumbo can nuke your timeline while also saving local copies onto your phone.
You can choose all tweets ever, or those that are older than a day, a week, a month or three months. Jumbo then archives those tweets into a Memories tab in its app and scrubs your Twitter feed.
The only thing missing is being able to export those saved tweets from the app. Jumbo is working on Dropbox and iCloud connectivity so you’ll be able to archive there in future. With the API restrictions Twitter now has, Jumbo can only clear 3,200 tweets every few days. That might need multiple cleaning sessions for you tweet-happy users.
I (didn’t) Google it, honest
Jumbo can scrub your entire Google search history, something that most of us want to do at least once in our lives. Just say “Thank U, next” to your search history.
Alexa is losing her mind
The last trick Jumbo has in its bag at the minute is to make the usually knowledgeable Alexa lose all the voice recordings that Amazon has of your queries. Just like your Google search, this should really be done periodically as well.
Future plans
Jumbo is also working on a way to clean out your Instagram feed, and your Tinder matches and chat threads. Heaven forbid your new swipe-right finds your old chat histories…
Privacy by design
Jumbo says that all the changes to your social accounts are all done locally, with no data going to its servers. Essentially, that means that it’s no different than you doing all the changes yourself, just a whole lot easier. It’s also planning to open source some of its tech stack, so anyone worried about being spied on can check for themselves.
What do you think? Is Jumbo something you’d consider using? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.
Editors’ Recommendations:
- Facebook wants to handle your death better than your data
- YouTube TV jumps to $50 a month but adds 8 Discovery channels
- A shit-ton of Facebook user data was found right in plain sight on Amazon Cloud servers
- If you’re a Verizon FiOS customer, update your router asap
- Twitter will now allow for faster suspension appeals within the app
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