When you’re trying to establish or maintain your personal brand, you need to be on top of your game. While you want to share and contribute to establish yourself, oversharing or sharing viruses are a constant issue you need to avoid. Secure.me is a new privacy-monitoring app dedicated to protecting you from these exact things on Facebook.
Secure.me allows you to take control of your online blueprint by making the privacy settings less complicated and easier to understand. Their motto is: On the mission for a safe and carefree Internet experience.
After you’ve linked your Facebook account to Secure.me, you can choose to have your account monitored 24/7 to remain protected at all times from questionable content. There is also an option for parents to monitor their child’s Facebook account. When setting up your account be sure to check out some of these key features:
Summary: This is all of your information in one place. From here you can scan your Facebook profile to find if you have any “threats,” which include harmful content or potential breeches of privacy. The summary page gives you a graph of the scanned posts within certain time periods – 7, 30, or 90 days. You also have the option of choosing to turn on automatic monitoring, meaning your profile is being watched 24/7, otherwise the default setting allows you choose when you want to scan your profile. It’s very similar to a virus scanner on your computer, but instead it’s for your Facebook.
Photos: This feature allows you to enable biometric face recognition, meaning the application recognizes your face. You can set this up by adding three photos of yourself to make the search more accurate. Once activated, it will scan your network to find pictures of you whether you are tagged or not. Secure.me will locate these photos for you and show where to find them on Facebook, however it does not tag you in them. You have the option to have it continuously searching photos, or you can choose to only scan it when you are logged onto the Secure.me website.
Activities: This shows you all of your recent Facebook activity. It includes: status updates, comments, “likes,” locations, friends, and events. It separates them based on what type of activity they are, and flags any problematic content.
Privacy Analysis: This setting includes all of your personal information you have on your profile. Depending on your privacy settings, secure.me will alert you if something needs to be changed due to security purposes. You will receive a rank out of 10 – 10 being the most secure your profile can be.
Profile and Network Analysis: Both the profile and network analysis scan your entire Facebook page for negative or questionable posts. It uses language analysis to decipher the “mood” of your profile or your network; secure.me lets you know what is negative, neutral, or positive. If there are questionable posts, they will appear in a timeline format. The profile and network analysis also tell you what topics you or your friends usually write about. It also shows the source of your posts – either from you, your friends, or from apps. You will receive a score from 1-10, and again 10 is the best number you can receive.
Notifications: This part of your secure.me profile is where you decide what notifications you want to receive. You choose what email address you want, and how often they should alert you. You control the notification settings of when new photos are found, when you have been tagged, harmful links, content harmful to minors, wall posts, and other threats. You can opt to never be notified or on a weekly, daily, or immediate basis.
Pros of Secure.me
- Free
- Protection from malicious links
- Finding pictures you had no idea existed of yourself on Facebook
- Demonstrates how your privacy could be threatened
- Alerts you when anything is suspicious on your Facebook
- Easier to use than Facebook privacy settings
- Empowers parents to keep children safe on the internet
- You have control over the options and features you want to utilize
Cons of Secure.me
- Could be misinterpreted as another threat to privacy because it thoroughly examines your Facebook page
- Breeches privacy of your friend network
- Language analysis is very strict
- Biometric face recognition could be considered controversial
Overall, this is a great new privacy-monitoring app and it gives insight into the future of social media protection. It is a free website, and the fact it allows you to control what you want to be alerted about is one of the best features. When establishing your personal brand you need to be proactive. Utilizing apps and features that help you feel safer on the Internet are valuable options, and something you need to consider so you can rest at ease.
