Design and Implementation of FAITH, An Experimental System to Intercept and Manipulate Online Social Informatics

Abstract

Social informatics is the core of Facebook's business and is its most valuable asset which consists of the social graph and the private data of over 500 million users. However, without secure methods of managing this data, Facebook has become vulnerable to privacy risks and devaluation. In Facebook's model, users are asked upon access to grant applications the required permissions without sufficient knowledge of the applications' intentions. As a result, if they are deceived, users risk the exposure of sensitive and personal data. This paper presents a system dubbed FAITH (Facebook Applications: Identification, Transformation & Hypervisor) to mitigate or eliminate these issues by enhancing the management of social data. First, FAITH allows users to adjust the visibility of their social informatics for each individual application depending on how much they trust the application. Users can configure FAITH to let non-trusted applications run with the least privileges (least amount of social informatics) to minimize potential privacy leaks. Second, FAITH logs the activities of applications to assist users in making more secure decisions. Users can closely monitor each activity performed by applications to adjust their privacy settings more securely. Third, FAITH allows users to transform their social graph such that different applications see different social graphs preventing the formation of friendship inflation caused by applications. The implementation of FAITH only needs the resources and tools available to the public by Facebook and requires no further cooperation from the social network. FAITH is a prototype system: the design and concept can be extended to secure other OSNs (Online Social Networks). Currently, FAITH contains thirteen Facebook social applications and has been officially released for public usage with approximately two hundred monthly active users as of now.

Enhanced Privacy and Surveillance for Online Social Networks

“…So the third parties use applications to access the user content typically only available to the OSN provider. The FAITH Architecture [21] is a system that protects users from the third party applications.…”

Crawling Online Social Networks

“…There have been efforts to make the social informatics on, for instance, Facebook available for applications (e.g., [1,2]). Additionally, researchers and developers have become more interested in using the social interaction networks, SINs [3], to further enhance and personalize their services [4].…”

Trustworthy opportunistic sensing: A Social Computing Paradigm

“…Most likely the majority of the applications are in fact developed by individual developers that you have little information about. Therefore, to ensure that social informatics are retrieved properly and securely it is important to design a system that enhance the management of social data [16]. One way to solve this issue is to log the activities of applications to assist the user with valuable information in making more secure decisions.…”

“…In general, such a system would work as some sort of a firewall, controlling outgoing and incoming social informatics. The Davis Social Link research group has created such an infrastructure called FAITH (Facebook Applications: Identifications Transformation & Hypervisor) to provide more trustworthy and flexible services to OSN users [16]. FAITH itself is a Facebook application, but works as a proxy between users and Facebook.…”