SmartShare: Free tool for secure social sharing

Veracode released SmartShare, a free tool designed to offer developers, bloggers and marketers a more secure method of on-site bookmark sharing.

With more online content being shared than ever before, there has been an increase in the number of tools available for download, such as popular plugins like AddThis and ShareThis. Many sharing tools track users and gain access to valuable information, like web browsing history, which is stored in user profile databases that can be breached.

“We wanted to release SmartShare as a free tool for the development, blogger and marketing communities to help create a more secure environment for people to share content,” said Chris Eng, vice president of research at Veracode. “Using commercial sharing tools not only automatically opts users in for ad tracking, but can potentially expose their information to hackers. With SmartShare, these risks are reduced.”

Like other commercial sharing tools, Veracode’s SmartShare bookmark is simple to use and easy to install, however it does not automatically track its users and only shares information with trusted social networks. By sharing with very limited number of networks rather than hundreds as other tools do, SmartShare helps to ensure added browser security.

“Being a security company, the Veracode Marketing Team is held to a very high security standard. Yet we understand the critical importance of social sharing in achieving our online marketing goals,” said Fergal Glynn, Director of Online Marketing at Veracode. “We faced a choice between not using social sharing at all or developing a more secure tool of our own. We chose the latter and now we want to share it with others.”