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How safe is the My Permissions site? It looks like a good way to keep track of what inter-web-app permissions you've granted, at least for the big names. However, I'm at the stage where I'm considering installing the Chrome extension, and I wonder if doing this just adds another layer of potential insecurity by handing all my permissions/IDs to My Permissions themselves. Do they ever get shared with the My Permissions site directly?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Disclosure: I'm MyPermissions' CTO.

MyPermissions.org itself is simply a list of links pointing to the exact places in websites such as Facebook where they manage the permissions you have given to 3rd party apps. In some websites, these links can be deep inside the user interface and are very hard to find. On MyPermissions.org you can also register for a monthly email reminder to check your permissions.

The current version of MyPermissions iOS app does the same as the MyPermissions.org website but also allows you to set a reminder to check your permissions as well as fix certain permissions pages on some sites which are not suitable for mobile browsers.

MyPermissions Cleaner - the browser extension does the scanning for you so you don't have to remember to run it yourself. It doesn't request your username and password since it runs inside the browser and bound to the same security restrictions as other extensions (depending, of course, on the type of browser). In the case of Facebook scanning, it will scan the currently logged on Facebook account.

Our main dilema when building MyPermissions Cleaner was how to obtain access to the user's list of apps without requesting the user's credentials (username & password). The solution we eventually employed in the current version of the extension was to use the current logged on user to the services such as Facebook. That way we don't require the user's credentials and we can still access the list of apps and perform the scan.

If you use MyPermissions Cleaner we only store apps you have marked as "Trusted" associated with your accounts so we'll know not to alert you on these apps. The rest of the data we store (such as general apps usage and statistics) is anonymous and is not directly linked to real specific users.

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Searched for "MyPermissions" and didn't find trustworthy reviews. Most were just normal blogs or mainstream press, but with no background or technical information.

MyPermissions is featured in Naked Security Blog from Sophos so I would give it a try. Naked Security Blog has a good reputation among Security folks.

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