High availability, scalable storage, dynamic peer networks: pick two
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
PeerSoN: P2P social networking: early experiences and insights
Proceedings of the Second ACM EuroSys Workshop on Social Network Systems
Persona: an online social network with user-defined privacy
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Privacy, cost, and availability tradeoffs in decentralized OSNs
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks
Lockr: better privacy for social networks
Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Enabling private conversations on Twitter
Proceedings of the 28th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Building confederated web-based services with Priv.io
Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks
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While highly successful, today's online social networks (OSNs) have made a conscious decision to sacrifice privacy for availability and centralized control. Unfortunately, tradeoffs in this "walled garden" architecture naturally pit the economic interests of OSN providers against the privacy goals of OSN users, a battle that users cannot win. While some alternative OSN designs preserve user control over data, they do so by de-prioritizing issues of economic incentives and sustainability. In contrast, we believe any practical alternative to today's centralized architecture must consider incentives for providers as a key goal. In this paper, we propose a distributed OSN architecture that significantly improves user privacy while preserving economic incentives for OSN providers. We do so by using a standardized API to create a competitive provider marketplace for different components of the OSN, thus allowing users to perform their own tradeoffs between cost, performance, and privacy. We describe Polaris, a system where users leverage smartphones as a highly available identity provider and access control manager, and use application prototypes to show how it allows data monetization while limiting the visibility of any single party to users' private data.