You’ve signed up with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, Pinterest, Stumble, Foursquare, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Flickr, etc. (and multiple times for some). You’ve also granted many third party services at least some sort of access to these, and, let’s face it: you’ve forgotten about most of them, and you’re probably NOT going into each and every one of these accounts to unsubscribe, audit app permissions, or update your info, etc.
Wouldn’t be great if you could simply manage your accounts all at once from one place? Three free tools let you do exactly that: AdjustYourPrivacy lets you adjust privacy settings, MyPermissions helps you intelligently audit your third party permissions, and is a must if you use Facebook.
Finally, Bliss Control will not just manage the permission settings, but will let you do a range of things including changing usernames, passwords, email and email settings, bios, deleting accounts, changing mobile settings, recovering passwords, changing profile pictures, editing connected accounts, and of course, it also lets you change 3rd party permissions.
One thing needs to be mentioned upfront: all of these tools are, in some sense, a collection of links, in that every change you make will be on the Facebook website or Twitter or whatever other service is. You will not need to give your authentication info to any of the services themselves.
1. MyPermissions
As the name suggests, it is geared towards editing (and auditing) the permissions that other services or apps have in your online accounts. Comes in the form of a web app and an iOS app (you can read about the iOS app here).
Clicking on the service in the list (screenshot above left) takes you to the permissions page for each service, such as the Twitter permissions page pictured above right.
MyPermissions also offers free browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) that will notify you in real time on your desktop whenever an app obtains or changes Facebook privileges.
The browser extension really shines when auditing Facebook permissions, though. It will show a list of apps and let you edit the specific privileges granted to each (see screenshot below).
2. Bliss Control
Has a lot wider scope than MyPermissions. Not only will it let you change third party app permissions, ‘Bliss Control’ provides an all-in-one handy interface to do any number of things: change your bio, password, username, email, email settings, mobile settings, change profile picture, change design, change connected accounts, change 3rd party permissions, or even delete your account.
List of available functions (below).
What’s unique about Bliss Control is not just the number of things you can do from the interface, but the interface itself, which is stylish yet very intuitive and easy to use.
3. AdjustYourPrivacy
A service similar to ‘MyPermissions’ above, geared towards changing privacy settings. It supports a larger number of online services (20 services at the time of this writing, compared to 12 with MyPermissions’). However, ‘AdjustYourPrivacy’ does not have the same kind of bells and whistles that ‘MyPermissions’ has, in terms of an iOS app, Chrome extension and the really nice way the latter handles auditing the permissions for individual Facebook apps.
AdjustYourPrivacy does include a ‘personal’ search tool intended to show you the extent that your own personal information on various services is publically available.
In Conclusion:
If you want to take control of your accounts and who and access them, give these services a try. MyPermissions is a must if you are an avid Facebook user (get the browser extension absolutely!), or if you need the iOS app, but Bliss Control is also terrific, because of it’s rather excellent interface, and because it lets you do so many more things that simply manage permissions.
