Privacy Pal: Improving Permission Safety Awareness of Third Party Applications in Online Social Networks

Social networks have become an integral part of our society, and for good reason, which make it easier for people to keep in touch with their friends and family, while also generating new and interesting social data. However, the incredible volume of personal information exposed by these networks has some potentially severe social consequences. First, in order to protect themselves legally, many social websites have adopted privacy policies that do little to protect an individual's rights. Second, ethically questionable data collection practices on social networks by third party developers are becoming more commonplace. Finally, the data collected from social networks are being used and analyzed in previously unanticipated ways, suggesting that it is important to protect even the most mundane data. As a result, there is a need for users to be better informed about the dangers to their personal privacy and security, especially when granting permissions to third party applications from relatively unknown developers. In this paper, we present Privacy Pal, a simple and effective analysis and visualization tool that allows users to gain an increased level of understanding on the security and privacy risks associated with granting permissions to third party applications in online social networks, like Facebook.