secretbook1When it comes to keeping things private and away from the prying eyes of friends and family, posting it onto Facebook is probably one of the last things you’d want to do, or is it? A browser extension by the name of Secretbook is hoping to change that, and possibly even confuse those trying to invade your privacy. Put together by 21-year old Oxford University student and former Google intern, Owen-Campbell Moore, Secretbook basically allows anyone to encode hidden messages into pictures and upload it onto Facebook.

The messages can then be decoded through a password that the user creates, which means you will actually be able to publically share images that to the layman is just a picture, nothing more. While this sounds like a cool idea, we can only imagine that it could lead to company employees leaking secrets and sharing information meant to be private, but according to Campbell-Moore, “The goal of this research was to demonstrate that JPEG steganography can be performed on social media where it has previously been impossible.”

As it stands, the Secretbook browser extension is only available for Google Chrome and is limited to 140 characters, about as long as a text message, meaning that lengthy and complex secrets might be harder to be leaked. Campbell-Moore admitted that while it is possible that terrorists could use Secretbook for nefarious purposes, the fact that it is not completely foolproof could deter them. Like we said, it sounds interesting but could potentially be dangerous, but if you want to check it out anyway, the extension is available via the Google Chrome Webstore, or you can head on over to Wired’s Danger Room for the details.

Filed in Web. Read more about .

Discover more from Ubergizmo

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading