Privacy, Security, and Social Networking APIs
1 March 2008Dr. Dobb’s has an article on Adrienne Felt’s work: Privacy, Security, and Social Networking APIs
Do social networking users need to worry about privacy and security? You bet, says CS student.
Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. And according to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.
… Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.
She has developed a privacy-by-proxy system — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name (and other personal information).