McAfee Social Protection Polices Your Facebook Pics

They're all sorts of reasons that you might not want your photos being shared without your permission. For a lot of people uploading photographs to Facebook is just a way to share with family and close friends. However, it can be difficult or impossible to control who those people share your photographs with later and to prevent people from downloading those photographs and saving them.

Security company McAfee has announced a new way to protect your photographs on Facebook called McAfee Social Protection. The application has launched as a beta product on Facebook and protects pictures from being shared without your permission. Social Protection is a Facebook app that works with a browser plug-in.

That browser plug-in and app combine to allow the user to select which friends can access their photos, and everyone else who tries to view the photographs will see blurry pictures. For the friends who are selected to be able to view the photographs, they will have to install the app to see them creating a layer protection. This may be the perfect plug-in to keep pictures of you doing something stupid from becoming an Internet meme.

Social Protection also prevents anyone from capturing screenshots of your picture. Instead of getting a clean screenshot capture tools only copy blank space. The app also disables the save and download feature and shows a padlock icon over the picture when the user scrolls over it. For now, the Facebook app and browser plug-in are only available for Internet Explore 8 and up or Firefox 8 and up. Chrome users are out of luck.