topaz

Ho, hum, look Mabel, there's a new Great Satan of the Internet: Frienditto!

Today's drama is that Frienditto bills itself as an "archiving service": you give it the URL of a LiveJournal post, and Frienditto archives it on their system (which looks and feels a lot like LiveJournal itself). If the post is friends-locked, you can still archive it if you give them your LJ username and password. I'm not sure why anyone would want to do such a thing, but charcoal a son goat and all that.

In the last day or so a lot of people have been saying things like, "If you use Frienditto, please remove me from your friends list." Which, IMNSHO, is not a particularly useful response.

Because, as far as I can tell from looking at it:

Frienditto does not archive everything it sees. It archives specific posts that you name for it. Giving it your LJ username and password does not cause it to suck in everything it can find on your friends list. In order for something from your journal to be archived there, someone would have to give the URL for that specific post to Frienditto, along with their LJ authentication info.

Sure, once someone gives them their LJ username and password, it's theoretically possible that they could do these things. With a username and password they can do anything, up to and including deleting the owner's entire journal and posting a CraigsList personal ad with their contact information. But I don't believe that they are doing either of these things.

And:

If someone takes you off their friends list, it doesn't protect you. As long as they are still on your friends list, they can still access your protected entries and archive them any way they want.

Protecting yourself from Frienditto or similar services is as simple as taking these steps:

Post this comment: "Please don't use Frienditto or any other service to archive posts from my journal. You're welcome to archive your own journal this way, but please keep mine out of it."
Go through your friends list. Is there anyone there who you do not think you can trust to honor this request? Remove them.

This bid for a lower-drama LiveJournal has been brought to you by topaz_munro.