Remember how excited you were when you learned that you could connect your Flickr account to Facebook so that all of your photos could easily be uploaded and shared with your friends? Or, how intrigued you were with the idea of posting every single update to all of your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn friends simultaneously? All it took was a few clicks here and a couple there and, pow, you were in business. Do you know what all those clicks were doing? They were extending an open invitation to the applications (apps) you added to access the information in your accounts – information which may or may not be needed to complete the activity you’ve assigned to the app.
Most of the more popular social networking platforms now allow us to connect our profiles with cool applications which make it a snap to share photos, find new people, simultaneously post to multiple sites and so on. Most of these applications were designed by third parties, which means that even though we use them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, they were created by people outside these companies. When we use these applications, we also give them permission to view our accounts. This often means that the people who created these applications have access to our personal information, such as our email, phone, list of our friends, etc.
As long as we’re careful about which apps we connect to our accounts, we should be in good shape. What often happens, though, is that we hear about a new app, decide to try it out and then we forget about it. All of those apps that we’ve tried, but don’t continue to use still have access to all of our data. Can you remember all of the apps you’ve added to each of your accounts? No? Me neither. The good news is that, with just a few short minutes of your time, you can delete all of those old apps that you tried on and decided that they didn’t fit.
To find the apps you’ve added and delete those you no longer use, go here:
Twitter – Click ‘Revoke Access’ below each app you’d like to delete.
Facebook – To remove an app, click the X to the right. To see what information the app is accessing from your profile, click on ‘Edit Settings’
LinkedIn – To delete an app, check the box next to its name and click ‘Remove’ at the bottom of the page. You’ll also be able to see which apps you’ve added from within LinkedIn and which were added while you were on another website.
A word of caution before you begin deleting…be sure that you are indeed no longer using that particular application. Is it possible that you actually are using it? All I’m suggesting is to pause for a moment, then delete to your heart’s content.
How many apps did you find on each account? I tend to try out a lot of apps and actually continue to use many of them. Still, I was surprised to find 75 on my own Facebook account. Anyone beat that?
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