Socialspy: Browsing (supposedly) hidden information in online social networks

Andrea Burattin, Giuseppe Cascavilla*, Mauro Conti

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Online Social Networks are becoming the most important “places” where people share information about their lives. With the increasing concern that users have about privacy, most social networks offer ways to control the privacy of the user. Unfortunately, we believe that current privacy settings are not as effective as users might think. In this paper, we highlight this problem focusing on one of the most popular social networks, Facebook. In particular, we show how easy it is to retrieve information that a user might have set as (and hence thought as) “private”. As a case study, we focus on retrieving the list of friends for users that did set this information as “hidden” (to non-friends). We propose four different strategies to achieve this goal, and we evaluate them. The results of our thorough experiments show the feasibility of our strategies as well as their effectiveness: our approach is able to retrieve a significant percentage of the names of the “hidden” friends: i.e., some 25% on average, and more than 70% for some users.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRisks and Security of Internet and Systems - 9th International Conference, CRiSIS 2014, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsIndrajit Ray, Bruno Crispo, Javier Lopez
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages83-99
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783319171265
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Event9th International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems, CRiSIS 2014 - Trento, Italy
Duration: 27 Aug 201429 Aug 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8924
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems, CRiSIS 2014
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTrento
Period27/08/1429/08/14

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Socialspy: Browsing (supposedly) hidden information in online social networks'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this