While many of us here on Hive, and the blockchain in general, share a common dislike for traditional social media platforms, many of us also fail at staying away from them.
Despite their ongoing privacy intrusion and centralized habits which more often than not cause collateral damage. Damage to free speech, damage to public opinion due to their vast size, and damage to the health of their users even.
I am not different and as I recently shared I still frequently use Twitter. While I could now argue that my Twitter usage is rather limited and I mostly broadcast (links) only, I won’t.
What I will argue though is that compared to most users, my Twitter settings are probably set to cause as little privacy issues as possible. I know, a tedious task to most but one I have always taken care off and regularly review on the platforms I have accounts on.
I don’t use Facebook so I escape the horror that its privacy settings are, which are constantly updated too.
I still do have a Google account, since I use an Android phone and, also here, I think I’m on top of my privacy as much as possible. Another tedious task, especially if your Google account is older since different, more permissive default settings may apply to those accounts.
Most people don’t like performing tedious tasks and who’s to blame them for that? I surely am not. The privacy settings of many a modern app are often a nightmare to tune and stay on top of.
Luckily, as the internet continues to age and mature, there’s always more available options to fix things with less effort.
Jumbo: Privacy + Security App
I occasionally mention privacy focused apps here on my Hive presence. Especially for the mobile era, but that is probably biased by me working from a mobile only setup. Today is no exception to that and I wish to introduce another excellent “privacy app”, this time for social media users.
For Facebook, Twitter, and also Google users: Jumbo: Privacy + Security app.
Jumbo is a mobile software suite which will tweak your privacy settings on those platforms to be less permissive and give less data away. With barely any interaction by yourself.
What Can Jumbo: Privacy + Security Do?
Jumbo offers protection across four different categories
- Security (dark web, two-factor authentication)
- Digital Footprint (old tweets or Facebook posts; search history)
- Tracking (ad tracking, social media online status)
- Reputation & Data Leaks (profile info, Facebook tagging and post visibility)
Additionally, it can help reduce your digital footprint by deleting old Facebook and tweets for you. There’s even a setting to make tweets “ephemeral” (delete each tweet after a specific amount of time).
And most importantly, in the context of this post:
- Turn off Facebook’s facial recognition feature.
- Limit Google’s use of your search history.
- Protect your data from being used by Google and Facebook for ads and advertisers.
- Limit ads that follow you around.
- Limit location tracking by Google and Facebook.
But, of course, that isn’t all. The second major release of Jumbo, which was released earlier this year in July, covers many more privacy and security options for you.
Freemium Model
Jumbo: Privacy + Security is a freemium app, meaning many of the features are available per for free. Pro users get access to more features, but the most important features are available for free.
Jumbo is regularly updated — in July they announced $8m Series A funding — and is one of the privacy apps to follow. Especially if you’re the type of user who doesn’t really stays on top of your privacy (settings).
Jumbo: Privacy + Security is available for both iOS and Android.
The app isn’t open-source though, so there’s no F-Droid store variant.
Important Note
For Jumbo: Privacy + Security to be able to change account settings for you, you need to share your account password with the app. The team is adamant though that they never store any data.
Sadly enough, we have to take the team’s word at face value as public audits of the code aren’t possible because Jumbo: Privacy + Security isn’t open-source. But so dar no reports of data breaches are known. If this is a deal breaker for you — it should — you are probably not the audience of this post. ;)