For quite a while now, we used the "Add This" toolbar to allow readers to quickly share articles with various social networks. As a security site, we talk a lot about the risks of social networks, but we can't ignore them. Our mission is to get the word out about current security issues. Social media are becoming an important tool to assist us with that.

At the same time, we are very aware of the privacy issues. Lucky for us, the german technology website Heise Online came up with a great solution. The "Social Sharing Privacy" toolbar we are using as of today will not leak any data about you to social networks or companies like "Add This" until you explicitly turn on the toolbar. If you would like to share a story via Twitter/Facebook/Google , you will first need to turn on the toolbar (which will load the actual images from the respective sites) and then you are able to "share".

I hope this will not prevent too many of you from sharing our stories to your social media accounts. We will still tweak the toolbar a bit. Please let us know if you see issues with specific browsers (we are usually testing with Safari on OS X, Firefox on Linux and sometimes even with IE on Windows).

Plugins for popular tools like Wordpress are available.

Social sharing privacy source code: http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/
This blog post helped me quite a bit: http://benjamin-steininger.de/2011/12/07/extending-heise-socialshareprivacy-to-pass-a-dynamic-title-to-twitter/

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
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