According to their website, “Jumbo is your privacy assistant.”
I want a privacy assistant! And if that privacy assistant comes in the form of a convenient app with a cute elephant mascot, all the better.
Jumbo’s stated goal for 2019 is to assemble a community of one million humans, all of who are protecting their privacy via the app — and according to TechCrunch, “Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices.”
Yesssss.
This is what Jumbo can currently do, all via one universal interface:
Adjust 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you the highest level of privacy protection (or medium or even weak – you choose)
Delete old tweets after saving them to your phone
Erase your Google Search history
Erase your Amazon Alexa history
And coming soon: Features for Insta and Tinder!
The “Jumbo Cleaning Mode” promises to save users the hours of manual work it would take to backup and remove old stuff from the internet. There is also this thing called “Jumbo Memories” that lets you access your cleaned data, which is encrypted and stored in your phone in its own folder. iCloud and Dropbox capabilities are coming soon, too.
The Verge wrote this explainer:
Social apps have long provided privacy settings to help you manage who can see your posts. Yet, time and again, we find ourselves surprised to learn that we’ve given away more than we intended — whether it’s a years-old tweet that lands us in hot water, a Facebook post we never intended our ex to see or something even more serious…
Jumbo, a new privacy assistant app for iOS, attempts to take the guesswork out of privacy settings. While the app is hindered significantly by restrictions from social media platforms, it could prove useful to anyone who wants to reduce the amount of data they have left around the social web.
Sold!
“Privacy is something that people want, but at the same time it just takes too much time for you and me to act on it,” Jumbo founder Pierre Valade told TechCrunch. “So you’re left with two options: You can leave Facebook, or do nothing.”
Myself? I have left Facebook. But for many people and for various reasons, giving ol’ Zuck the finger is not an option. And for models who like to keep some distinction between their personal and professional presentations and networks, Facebook is often the biggest issue. Maybe Jumbo can help?
Valade continued, “I’ve used Jumbo to clean my full Twitter, and my personal feeling is: I feel lighter. On Facebook, Jumbo changed my privacy settings, and I feel safer.” Inspired by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein a political data firm gained access to more than 50 million Facebook users’ private data, TechCrunch reported that Valade believes the platforms have lost the right to steward so much of users data.
How Jumbo Works
Facebook: The app asks you to enter your username and password through a mini-browser open to Facebook. You probably will have to allow the app within your Facebook. Jumbo then adjusts your privacy settings to weak, medium or strong. As cryptic as Facebook privacy settings are, Jumbo knows the way.
Also, according to TechCrunch, Jumbo will “never make any privacy settings looser if you’ve already tightened them.”
Twitter: You can choose if you want to remove all your tweets ever (whaaaaa?!), or just tweets that are older than a day, a week, a month or three months. According to TechCrunch, Jumbo never sees the data as everything is processed locally on your phone. Also, before deleting the tweets, Jumbo archives them to the previously mentioned Memories folder in the app.
Note though that Twitter’s API limits means Jumbo can only erase 3,200 tweets of yours every few days. If you have lots of tweets, you may have to go through several rounds of Jumbo to get them all. Big. Dang. Deal!
Google: Jumbo deletes your search history.
Alexa: Jumbo deletes the voice recordings stored by Amazon.
According to TechCrunch, Jumbo is designed to never see any of your data. “There isn’t a server-side component that we own that processes your data in the cloud,” Valade said via TechCrunch. Everything is processed locally on your phone.
Y’all, get with Jumbo before the app gets whisked away by the internet overlords. There’s nothing wrong with a lil’ spring cleaning — It’s April!
Update: As soon as I finished writing this post, I got Jumbo and cleaned some personal tweets. IT TOTALLY WORKS.
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Erika is a sex positive people watcher (and writer). Email her at erika@ynotcam.com.
Screengrabs by the author.
