TWC: Small: Virtual Private Social Networks

TWC：小型：虚拟私人社交网络

• 批准号: 1318415
• 负责人: Steven Bellovin
• 金额: $ 49.83万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1318415&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: TWC; Small; Virtual; Private; Social

Social networking services have been transformed from one-stop websites, to social interaction platforms deeply integrated with third-party websites, applications, and even operating systems. As prominent examples, social plugins such as Facebook's Like and Google's +1 buttons enable websites to offer personalized content and allow their visitors to seamlessly share and interact with their social circles, while Facebook and Twitter support is already integrated in iOS 6. These social features offer multifaceted benefits to both users and content providers, and have driven their widespread adoption across the web and the mobile application ecosystem. However, this increasing integration has raised concerns about the implications of these social features to user privacy, as they enable social networking services to track a growing part of their members' activity, including their browsing histories, locations, and communications.The research in this project seeks to address these privacy concerns by exploring a novel design for privacy-preserving virtual private social networks, which fulfills two seemingly contradicting requirements: it protects user privacy by minimizing the transmission of user-identifying information to the social networking platform, while preserving all existing functionality by delivering the same personalized content. The main insight of this approach is to shift content personalization from a server-side to a client-side process, by decoupling the retrieval of potentially sensitive social information from the presentation of personalized content that uses that information. The PIs are developing a personalized "information overlay" that prefetches information from a user's social circle independently of third-party accesses, and keeps this information consistent across the user's devices. The outcomes of this research effort are expected to significantly improve the privacy of members of social networking services, without degrading the current personalization experience to which they have grown accustomed.

社交网络服务已经从一站式网站转变为与第三方网站、应用程序甚至操作系统深度集成的社交互动平台。作为突出的例子，Facebook的Like和Google的+1按钮等社交插件使网站能够提供个性化内容，并允许访问者与社交圈无缝共享和互动，而Facebook和Twitter的支持已经集成在iOS 6中。这些社交功能为用户和内容提供商提供了多方面的好处，并推动了它们在Web和移动的应用程序生态系统中的广泛采用。然而，这种日益增加的整合引起了人们对这些社交功能对用户隐私的影响的担忧，因为它们使社交网络服务能够跟踪越来越多的成员活动，包括他们的浏览历史，位置和通信。本项目的研究旨在通过探索一种保护隐私的虚拟私人社交网络的新设计来解决这些隐私问题，其满足了两个看似矛盾的要求：其通过最小化用户识别信息到社交网络平台的传输来保护用户隐私，同时通过传递相同的个性化内容来保留所有现有功能。这种方法的主要见解是将内容个性化从服务器端转移到客户端过程，通过将潜在敏感的社交信息的检索与使用该信息的个性化内容的呈现解耦。PI正在开发一种个性化的“信息覆盖”，它可以独立于第三方访问从用户的社交圈中预取信息，并使这些信息在用户的设备上保持一致。这项研究工作的结果预计将显着提高社交网络服务的成员的隐私，而不会降低目前的个性化体验，他们已经习惯了。