Wallflower stops sites from socializing

As social networking has gone mainstream, so have the flock of buttons embedded in Web pages to get you to promote a story on the multitude of social-networking services you use. One Web developer has written a quick-and-dirty add-on that hides two of those gnat-like buttons from view. Dietrich Ayala, a developer for Mozilla based in Portland, Ore., wrote a new add-on called Wallflower to cut down on the memory use of buttons that he found superfluous.

The top half of this image is a CNET blog post without the Wallflower extension. Wallflower removes Facebook Like and Google+ buttons, as seen in the lower half of the image.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Wallflower is a restartless add-on for
Firefox, which means you won’t have to restart your browser after installing it, and it performs the simple task of knocking out the Facebook “Like,” Facebook “Connect,” and Google+ “+1″ buttons. In their place remains empty space filled by the site’s background color or pattern.

“The add-on took about 10 minutes to write,” Ayala said in an e-mail to CNET and mentioned in a comment on his blog announcing the add-on that it is not intended to be track-free browsing. “Wallflower is not written to leave no trace of your passing. It’s a few lines of code that I dashed off to detect if one of these pages loaded in an iFrame, and if so, changes [its] location to about:blank.”

The real impetus for the add-on was to cut down on memory usage. Ayala was checking out the Firefox’s memory usage via about:memory when he noticed spikes coming from Facebook and Google social-sharing buttons. His colleague Shawn Wilsher explores the problem further, concluding that while Firefox could do a better job of memory management in this area, Facebook also uses more than it should, too. This can become a noticeable drag on memory when you have dozens of tabs open, each pulling down active code for social-networking buttons.

“If you have 10 tabs open with Like buttons, your memory compartment for that particular URL will reflect that,” Ayala said.

There are other ways to block social-networking share buttons, and they may be more effective. Ayala admitted that Wallflower is buggy, given how little time it took him to write it. If you use the AdBlock Plus add-on, you can grab the “antisocial” blocklist which will knock out Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, and many other social networking share buttons.

While the social-networking buttons might be annoying to some, especially those on bandwidth-limited mobile devices, for others they’re a quick and easy way to share interesting sites with friends. You can get the word out about this story, for example, using the buttons at the top on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks.

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Caution: Should You Share Your Location on Facebook?

Facebook recently rolled out a number of changes to the social networking site. One of the changes eliminates the concept of Facebook Places, but instead incorporates location-aware updates at virtually every level of Facebook. You might want to think twice, though, before broadcasting your location to the anonymous masses online.

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Facebook has had a Foursquare-like check-in system for its mobile app for a while. Facebook Places has limited functionality, though, intended primarily for logging in at restaurants and retailers, and it doesn’t provide any means for someone with a notebook or tablet to record location data.

Does your whole social network really need to know you’re at McDonald’s right now?Maybe that’s a good thing. Do you want your entire social network–including some tenuous relationships with people you have never actually met in real life–to know that you are with your family having dinner at The Olive Garden?

The security experts at nCircle offer two opposing, but complementary viewpoints on the privacy and security implications of sharing location information. Andrew Storms, director of security operations, and Tim ‘TK’ Keanini, nCircle’s CTO shared some thoughts with me on this topic.

Storms warns, “You could be home for one post and then across town for the next. Now, everyone knows you aren’t home and the brand new TV you just told everyone about is also home–alone,” adding, “Posting this level of detail in any online forum opens the door to potential nefarious action.”

He explains that the issue of privacy and location information is really a matter of common sense, and recommends that you stop and think “does everyone in the world–or even everyone in my social network–really need to know my location at a given point in time?”

From Keanini’s perspective, it is delusional to think that you or your property are somehow safer just because you don’t post location information. It is a sort of security by obscurity fallacy that might give an illusion of better privacy, but the fact is that location information like your home address can be found by other means, and you’d better have some real protection in place.

Keanini says, “Locks, alarms, neighborhood watch–all of those things help to protect your home. In my book, it’s better to feel safe publishing your location because you know you have taken the appropriate safeguards than to be surprised by the disclosure of this kind of personal information.”

This is a privacy decision unique to your personal situation, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. What’s dangerous about all private data, including location data, is disclosing it without thinking through the implications. If you want to limit exposure of your location information, use the controls available within Facebook to limit the audience the data is shared with.

Storms sums up, “The moral of the story about location tagging is to think before you post.”

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