Los Angeles — Relentlessly striving to safeguard its vast users in a constant battle between wanting to share things like photos with the community and being a bit afraid of losing control of those photos to the web at large. Security software company McAfee today announced the launch of ‘Social Protection‘, a new Facebook app and browser plug-in developed by Intel’s Software and Services Group that basically protects your photos from being shared without your permission.
Amazingly though, even when friends gain access to your photos, they still would not be able to share, copy, print, or take screenshots of them, McAfee notes. With the app, users can select which friends they want to give access to their photos. Photos will look blurry to everyone not on the list. The screen capture mechanism with record a blank page, according to McAfee.
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The app also disables the save and download feature, displaying a padlock icon over the picture when a user scrolls over it. This unique lock feature is possible because when users upload protected photos through the app, those files go onto McAfee, rather than Facebook servers.
“As consumers continue to share more of their lives online through the photos they post to Facebook, they become increasingly vulnerable to the privacy pitfalls associated with not being able to fully control where their photos end up,” said Brian Foster, senior vice president of consumer product management for McAfee. “McAfee Social Protection helps to further underscore our commitment to safeguarding consumer’s safety, data and identities online.”
Image Credit: (BitsBlog)
On the other hand, McAfee’s newly released app that empowers users to add an extra layer of protection to their Facebook photos. The app asks users to explicitly list who should be able to see their photos. And because the app sends the photos to McAfee’s servers, not Facebook’s, it is able to turn off the save and downloading features.
McAfee Social Protection is only available on PCs running IE 8+ or Firefox 8+ (wat?). So, unfortunately if you are a Mac user, Chrome user, Safari User, etc., you are out of luck.
McAfee posted a demo of its new app on YouTube.
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