Privacy-Aware and Highly-Available OSN Profiles

Abstract

The explosive growth of online social networks (OSNs) and their wide popularity suggest the impact of OSNs on today's Internet. At the same time, concentration of vast amount of personal information within a single administrative domain causes critical privacy concerns. As a result, privacy-conscious users feel dis-empowered with today's OSNs. In this paper, we report on an on-going research work and introduce a privacy-aware decentralized OSN called \textit{porkut}. Our system exploits trust relationships in the social network for decentralized storage of OSN profiles and their content. By taking users' geographical locations and online time statistics into account, it also addresses availability and storage performance issues. We finally advocate indexing of social network content and present an approach for indexing in a privacy-preserving manner.