Virtual Private Social Networks

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are having a significant im- pact on the social life of many people—even beyond the mil- lions of people that use them directly. These websites usu- ally allow users to present a profile of themselves through a long list of very detailed information. However, even when such SNSs have advanced privacy policies, users are often not aware of their settings and, on top of that, users can- not abstain from sharing a minimum set of information (e.g. name and location). Such a small set of information has been proven to be enough to completely re-identify a user. In this work we introduce the concept of Virtual Private Social Networks (VPSNs), a concept inspired by the one of Virtual Private Networks in traditional computer networks. We argue that VPSNs can mitigate the privacy issues of SNSs, building private social networks that leverage archi- tecture publicly available for SNSs. Furthermore, we pro- pose FaceVPSN, which is an implementation of VPSNs for Facebook, one of the most used SNSs. FaceVPSN is the first privacy threats mitigation solution that has a light and com- pletely distributed architecture—no coordinator is required. Furthermore, it can be implemented without any particular collaboration from the SNS platform. Finally, experimental evaluation shows that FaceVPSN adds a limited overhead, which, we argue, is acceptable for the user.