Today\u2019s online social networking (OSN) sites do little to protect the privacy of their users\u2019 social networking information. Given the highly sensitive nature of the information these sites store, it is understandable that many users feel victimized and disempowered by OSN providers\u2019 terms of service. This paper presents Lockr, a system that improves the privacy of centralized and decentralized online content sharing systems. Lockr o\ufb00ers three signi\ufb01cant privacy bene\ufb01ts to OSN users. First, it separates social networking content from all other functionality that OSNs provide. This decoupling lets users control their own social information: they can decide which OSN provider should store it, which third parties should have access to it, or they can even choose to manage it themselves. Such \ufb02exibility better accommodates OSN users\u2019 privacy needs and preferences. Second, Lockr ensures that digitally signed social relationships needed to access social data cannot be re-used by the OSN for unintended purposes. This feature drastically reduces the value to others of social content that users entrust to OSN providers. Finally, Lockr enables message encryption using a social relationship key. This key lets two strangers with a common friend verify their relationship without exposing it to others, a common privacy threat when sharing data in a decentralized scenario. This paper relates Lockr\u2019s design and implementation and shows how we integrate it with Flickr, a centralized OSN, and BitTorrent, a decentralized one. Our implementation demonstrates Lockr\u2019s critical primary bene\ufb01ts for privacy as well as its secondary bene\ufb01ts for simplifying site management and accelerating content delivery. These bene\ufb01ts were achieved with negligible performance cost and overhead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today\u2019s online social networking (OSN) sites do little to protect the privacy of their users\u2019 social networking information. Given the highly sensitive nature of the information these sites store, it is understandable that many users feel victimized and disempowered by OSN providers\u2019 terms of service. 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