Since the launch and success of the iPhone, companies are coming to realize they can gain a competitive edge over the competition with very little risk if they can engage the developer community. As much, many web services nowadays – social networks, file storage services, photo sharing services, etc. – have third-party app development platforms on which developers develop and deploy their apps. Often these apps offer extended functionality not available on the vanilla version of the web service in question, so people tend to use these third-party apps. The issue, however, is often we ignore the privacy and security risks of these apps, simply allowing them to have whatever access to our accounts we want. MyPermissions is a website that advocates user awareness about third-party app permissions and makes it very easy for users to “clean up” app permissions.

In of itself MyPermissions is nothing unique or special. It is a simple homepage that provides links to the app permissions pages for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr. In other words, you could just as easily modify app permissions for any of the just-mentioned eight websites by manually finding the permissions pages yourself. (MyPermissions does not automatically cleanup app permissions.) However, MyPermissions makes it very easy to access the app permissions pages by providing direct links to the app permissions pages for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr; no need for you to dig around for the – often cleverly hidden – app permissions pages. Plus, if you are an ifttt user MyPermissions has an ifttt script you can use that reminds you once per month to check your app permissions.

If after you visit MyPermissions for the first time and grab the links you no longer want to be bothered with visiting MyPermissions again, you can easily bookmark or save the direct links to the app permissions pages for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr; and, if you wish, you can setup reminders on your own personal calendar instead of using ifttt to check app permissions as often you desire. So while MyPermissions is a good starting point, it isn’t something you need to keep going back to.

You can start cleaning up your app permissions by visiting MyPermission from the link below:

MyPermissions.org

[via Lifehacker]