Privacy Protection for Social Networking

Social networking APIs integrate third-party content into the site and give third-party developers access to user data. These open interfaces enable popular site enhancements but pose serious privacy risks by exposing user data to third-party developers. We address the privacy risks associated with social networking APIs by presenting a privacy-by-proxy design for a privacypreserving API that is motivated by an analysis of the data needs and uses of Facebook applications. Nearly all applications could maintain their functionality using a limited interface that only provides access to an anonymized social graph and placeholders for user data. Since the platform host can control the third-party applications’ output, privacy-by-proxy can be accomplished without major changes to the platform architecture or applications by using new tags and data transformations.