Avoid Getting an Unwanted Surprise on Twitter

You have come across an application on Twitter that will find your level of smartness with a click. You connect it to your Twitter account (using OAuth) and then you suddenly realize that that app has published your score to Twitter as well using your own account.

Such Twitter apps may be rare but they do exist and may sometimes embarrass you.

For instance, a popular directory would automatically change your Twitter profile as soon as you added yourself to that directory. More recently, we saw another Twitter app that would automatically tweet on your behalf and it nearly went viral.

How to Avoid Surprises on Twitter

If you would like to prevent apps from fiddling with your Twitter stream without asking, the easiest solution would be to not use them at all. That’s however an extreme approach as you’ll then miss a whole lot of other apps that are both nice and useful.

The solution is however simple. When you add an app to your Twitter account, you’ll see an authorization page where you can either allow or deny the app access to your Twitter data.

Read the language carefully. If it read something like “the app would like to access and update your data on Twitter,” you are granting the app permission to post to your Twitter stream. Majority of the Twitter apps won’t misuse that privilege but some may.

Therefore, if you are trying out a new app on Twitter that you have never heard of before, it may be a good idea to authorize only the ones that require read-only access to your Twitter data as seen in the screenshot below

Source: Digital Inspiration
Author: Amit Agarwal

Delete Facebook Apps that Now Have Greater Access to Your Data

At Facebook's f8 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers that Facebook applications would no longer have to dump any data they've collected on you after 24 hours. If you've got apps installed that might have prying eyes, here's how to uninstall them.
Facebook seems to change up its interface, and its settings, every few months, so if you thought you knew the easy way to remove an application entirely before, you might want to take a quick refresher. Not all Facebook applications are out to mine your personal stats for nefarious gain, but if you've kept an app or two hanging around because you thought there wasn't much exposure, here's how ReadWriteWeb recommends you go about showing them the door:

1. Click on "Account" at the top-right of the screen.
2. Click "Application Settings"
3. Change the "Show" drop-down box to "Authorized." This will show all the applications you've ever given permission to.
4. In the resulting list, click the "X" button on the far right next to each app you want to remove to delete it.
5. On the pop-up box that appears, click "Remove" then click "Okay" on the next box confirming the app was deleted.

Courtesy: LifeHacker

Author: Kevin