FaceCloak: An Architecture for User Privacy on Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Flickr, are gaining more and more popularity among Internet users. As users are enjoying this new style of networking, privacy concerns are also attracting increasing public attention due to reports about privacy breaches on social networking sites. We propose FaceCloak, an architecture that protects user privacy on a social networking site by shielding a user's personal information from the site and from other users that were not explicitly authorized by the user. At the same time, FaceCloak seamlessly maintains usability of the site's services. FaceCloak achieves these goals by providing fake information to the social networking site and by storing sensitive information in encrypted form on a separate server. We implemented our solution as a Firefox browser extension for the Facebook platform. Our experiments show that our solution successfully conceals a user's personal information, while allowing the user and her friends to explore Facebook pages and services as usual.