McAfee aims to prevent Facebook photo theft

" "

If you absolutely don’t want strangers to see, use or steal your photos, don’t put them on Facebook. But for a less drastic action, a new Facebook app might do the trick.

McAfee Social Protection is billed as giving users complete control over who can and cannot see their photos on Facebook. In theory you should be able to do that through Facebook itself, but that often turns out to be a crapshoot with the site changing its privacy policies without warning (although this has now been barred through an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.)


Even if you do get the privacy settings right, you still have to trust your chosen viewers won’t try to share them. If one day you wind up running for public office, your former friends can easily try to make a few bucks by downloading, printing or otherwise getting hold of a copy of your more embarrassing pics and selling them to the tabloids.

The McAfee solution works by keeping Facebook out of the loop. Once you’ve installed the app, any pics you upload are actually stored on McAfee servers rather than Facebook itself. The friends that you do allow to see the picture on Facebook are therefore looking at an external link, the same way as if you hotlinked to a news site’s photo in a status update.

The image on McAfee’s servers is coded in a way that means viewers can’t do anything with it other than see it. Take a screenshot and the pic is replaced with a blank space; try to hover over it to do a right-click save and it turns into a picture of a padlock; send a direct link to somebody else and they’ll just see a blurred version of the image.

One practical drawback is that with everything handled outside of Facebook, the people you give permission to view the image will have to install the app themselves. That works well for McAfee as it quickly spreads adoption of the app and in turn promotion of its brand.

This does have a massive limitation however: the app only works if you are running Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 8. That means not only are you out of luck if you are running Chrome or Safari, but if any of your friends run those browsers you’ve got a problem too.

Posted in: Facebook