A new social media service launches today called Scrambls which allows users to encrypt posts to Facebook, Twitter and any other websites essentially creating secure personal sharing across social networks.

It taps into the concern that many have about privacy particularly when it comes to Facebook. It will be interesting to see if this gains any traction and whether social network users do start hiding their posts from the wider world.

It means that Facebook won’t be able to take your content as all it will see are meaningless hieroglyphs.  It allows social network users to have entirely private, open conversations. That also means that a few years down the line when employers are checking your Facebook account for those damaging (possibly drunken) status updates and pictures they won’t see anything. Sounds useful, will  it catch on?

Scrambls also says it allows people to take back comments, or allow only certain people to access certain posts and thus regain control over personal content when posting it online

To “Scrambl messages”, users simply enable Scrambls in their browser to encode part or all of a message before it’s instantly uploaded to Facebook, Twitter a blog or wherever it is being posted. The cloud gets only Scrambld content. Uses can select the individuals or groups that can see the message in clear text on their devices. Friends just need to add Scrambls to their own browser and messages will look the same as usual for them. Anyone else that was not approved to read the post will see only Scrambld text.

Michael Sprague, Scrambls co-founder argues that the greater control Scrambls offers will allow greater use of social media and that people will be able to”post confidently, knowing your boss won’t see messages meant for high school friends, and permanent records of what you say online won’t come back to haunt you in the future”.

You can download the plugin from scrambls.com and there’s a short video here explaining how it works in more depth.