Protecting user privacy from social networking applications

Abstract EN

Day by day, users of social network are increasing.

They use different applications offered by social networking and publishing more personal information.

However, users try to protect their privacy by keeping their information as private or share them only with family members or friends group.

Further, many of them are unaware of the degree to which their privacy depends on third party applications and their developers, which left their private information vulnerable to accidental or malicious leaks by these applications.

In this work, we focus on users’ privacy concerns toward third-party application.

We provide methodology to prevent these applications from sharing users' data with friends inside a social network without user permission, by the proposed system to allow the users through the installation process to give different level of permission to the data that is requested by friends’ applications.

Finally, the proposed system is evaluated for feasibility with theoretical analysis as well as simulation experiments by developing a client server application by Java to simulate a social network environment.

Based on testing results, the proposed system assists users to have more control on their data and can achieve the level of privacy that they want.