Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Viral Privacy Startup (Really!) MyPermissions Raises Funds

MyPermissions, which helps people track and manage how their personal data is used by various online apps, has raised $1 million.

“The same way antivirus and firewalls protect, someone needs to protect your cloud,” CEO Olivier Amar told me earlier this week. “We’re that firewall.”

The idea is surprisingly viral. When at the beginning of 2012 the company invited users to get the year off to a fresh start by checking their permissions, 150,000 signed up in a matter of days. All it was? A simple HTML page that had direct links to the application authorization pages for Facebook, Twitter and other sites.

In the past year, MyPermissions has added all sorts of useful stuff, like browser extensions and iOS and Android apps, monitoring and alerts, and the option to disconnect all applications in one fell swoop.

So, I, for instance, can see that MyPermissions has flagged 13 applications that access my inbox or contacts, 175 applications that have 24/7 access to my info even when I’m not using them, and 164 applications that access my content or files.

At that stage, 40 percent of MyPermissions users opt to remove all apps at once, according to Amar. “We get comments all the time of people telling us ‘I had no idea.'”

But all that authorization information is only for Facebook. For Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox and other systems, the only option is still to click through to visit those sites directly. MyPermissions has a lot left to do.

To that end, the Tel Aviv-based company now has $1 million in funding from Lool Ventures, 500 Startups, 2B Angels, Plus Ventures and Robby Hilkowitz.

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