NOYB: Privacy in Online Social Networks

Increasingly, Internet users trade privacy for service. Facebook, Google, and others mine personal information to target advertising. This paper presents a preliminary and partial answer to the general question “Can users retain their privacy while still benefiting from these web services?”. We propose NOYB, a novel approach that provides privacy while preserving some of the functionality provided by online services. We apply our approach to the Facebook online social networking website. Through a proof-of-concept implementation we demonstrate that NOYB is practical and incrementally deployable, requires no changes to or cooperation from an existing online service, and indeed can be non-trivial for the online service to detect