secure.me

You've heard about the folks who lost their jobs because of a too-public, too-negative post (or simply, "because of oversharing") on Facebook. Are you perfectly sure the same couldn't happen to you? The secure.me app (free) will comb through your Facebook account and help you fix any problems. You can also use it for parental monitoring of your child's Facebook activity.

Getting started with secure.me is a snap. Just visit www.secure.me, sign in with your Facebook account, and install the secure.me app. Click the Scan now button, wait a few minutes, and you've got immediate insight into your profile. Secure.me can only get the most recent seven days from Facebook, but if you turn on automatic monitoring it can capture new activity in real time and retain it for up to 90 days.

Secure.me's Reports
Once the initial scan is complete, secure.me displays an overview, starting with a graph of scanned posts for the last seven, 30, or 90 days. Below this it summarizes its analysis of privacy issues as well as the state of your profile and your network. Each of these three topics gets a rating up to 10 points, with 10 being the best.

The Privacy Analysis page lists personal information found in your profile that could potentially be a threat to privacy. For myself, I'm not concerned that people can see my made-up political and religious affiliations, but it's reasonable for secure.me to suggest that I "think about whether this information will be useful or harmful." Marital status and family connections are among the other items that secure.me warns should be protected.

SafetyWeb ($100/year direct, 4 stars) also does privacy analysis, but with a different focus. It scans the Web to find accounts on over sixty social media sites, then reports on what information is public. The aim is to help you (or your child) make that public content private.

On the Profile Analysis page you can check for questionable status updates and posts. This page also rates the overall mood of your profile, from negative to positive, and offers advice on improving a negative profile. A word cloud identifies trending topics in your posts, and a simple pie chart breaks down your posts into those you made yourself, posts by others, and posts made through apps (including mobile Facebook apps).

You may have exemplary Facebook manners and a perfectly positive profile, but what about your friends? The Network Analysis page identifies questionable posts by others. In my own profile I found a number of dangerous links posted by friends as well as posts with what secure.me considers bad language. A similar feature in MinorMonitor (free, 4 stars) specifically flags individuals who regularly express negative sentiments.

MinorMonitor and SafetyWeb flag a huge range of words and phrases as negative. Secure.me seems to stick with undeniable bad language.

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