Towards a Privacy-Enhanced Social Networking Site

Abstract

Social Networking Sites (SNS), such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have become the established place for keeping contact with old friends and meeting new acquaintances. As a result, a user leaves a big trail of personal information about him and his friends on the SNS, sometimes even without being aware of it. This information can lead to privacy drifts such as damaging his reputation and credibility, security risks (for instance identity theft) and profiling risks. In this paper, we first highlight some privacy issues raised by the growing development of SNS and identify clearly three privacy risks. While it may seem a priori that privacy and SNS are two antagonist concepts, we also identified some privacy criteria that SNS could fulfill in order to be more respectful of the privacy of their users. Finally, we introduce the concept of a Privacy-enhanced Social Networking Site (PSNS) and we describe Privacy Watch, our first implementation of a PSNS.