Facebook includes an option to limit readership of your posts to specific groups, but you have to remember to use it. Other social media sites may not offer similar protection. A scrambls (free) membership lets you take total control of who can read any post. It isn’t military-grade encryption, but it works well for simple privacy, as long as all of your friends install it too.
To start using scrambls, you sign up for a free account and download the appropriate browser plug-in. The service currently offers plug-ins for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Fennec (Firefox’s mobile browser for Android). There’s no plug-in for Internet Explorer as yet, but the company is working on it.
The company specifically advertises that scrambls works with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Yammer, but it really should work for any social media site. If you discover a site where scrambls doesn’t work, the company wants to know about it.
You type your post as usual, but when you send it scrambls replaces the text with a social-media-friendly encrypted version. If you’re logged in to scrambls you’ll still see the plain-text post. If not, or if you’re not authorized to see the post, it looks like gibberish.
Defining Groups
Out of the box, scrambls defines two groups, Everyone and Only Me. A post scrambld for the Everyone group will be visible to any other scrambls user; a post set to Only Me can’t be viewed by anyone but you.
You’ll probably want to define your own groups to control access. Unfortunately you can’t import your friends list from Facebook. The simplest way to define a group is by using a list of email addresses. According to the scrambls site, “We will soon be adding support for other identifiers, such as a Facebook id, as well as the ability to assign multiple identifiers to one account.”
Scrambls offers a number of advanced methods for defining a group. You can include entire domains, for example, to keep certain posts accessible only within your company. You can also exclude specific domains or addresses.
One way to avoid entering an endless list of addresses is the shared secret technique. You define a shared secret (basically a passphrase) for the group. Any scrambls user who wants to view posts assigned to this group must enter the passphrase to see the plain text.
Group rules can also determine just when a post can be viewed. You can control the beginning and ending date for viewing of posts to a group, or set posts to become active and expire after a specified time. For business users, there’s an option to authenticate users via an external service; setting this up will require help from scrambls tech support.
Your initial choice of group for a post isn’t set in stone. At any time you can right-click a scrambld post and choose a different group. Setting a post to the Only Me group effectively hides it from everyone else.
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