In recent years, online social networks have been growing exponentially, as these networks are fantastic place to meet and network with people sharing similar personal interests.Facebook, is the biggest social network, has more than 901 million active users with around 50% of users logging into Facebook on a daily basis. The amount of personal information each user exposes on social network such as Facebook is staggering. Recent research in the area evaluated that 36% of Facebook users exposed personal information. In our project, we developed a set of tools, aiming to improve the security and privacy on Facebook. Our solution contains three different tools which provide different layers of protection.The first tool is an expansion of Facebook’s basic privacy settings by adding additional privacy settings for different types of users’ groups. The additional settings include privacy settings for children, celebrities and recommended settings. The second tool is a friends classifier. The friends classifier detects which of the user’s friends may oppose threat to his privacy and therefore should be inserted into a restricted list. By this type of action the user prevents unwanted people from compromise his private information. The third tool is applications classifier. The application classifier alerts the user on the number of installed Facebook applications which may oppose threat on his privacy. Currently this project is under an alpha testing with several dozen users.
How to use social privacy protector?
1. Download Firefox add-on.
Click on the downloaded application, which will open up the application.
Please note the download is only accessible via Mozilla Firefox.2. Install the project.
3. Open your facebook privacy account.
4. On the right side of your Facebook page above the sponsored ads you will see the pink application ad to install the application.
5. Install the Facebook application.
This application will recommend which people from your friends list you should restrict.6. Another tool you may use is deleting of unused applications.
Click on the link which will send you to a page where you can delete all the applications you no longer want.7. The last tool enables you to change your favorite privacy settings.
All you have to do is to go to click in the arrow next to Home>Privacy Settings.
You will immediately notice an arrow which points to 3 additional settings: Kids, Recommended, and Celebrity.
All you have to do is to choose your favorite settings and wait for the new settings to appear.
A list of the changes that were made will be presented to you.
You may leave us a messages such as feedbacks and improvements you think we should add.
Have fun!