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SocialSpy: Browsing (Supposedly) Hidden Information in Online Social Networks

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Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8924))

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Abstract

Online Social Networks are becoming the most important “places” where people share information about their lives. With the increasing concern that users have about privacy, most social networks offer ways to control the privacy of the user. Unfortunately, we believe that current privacy settings are not as effective as users might think.

In this paper, we highlight this problem focusing on one of the most popular social networks, Facebook. In particular, we show how easy it is to retrieve information that a user might have set as (and hence thought as) “private”. As a case study, we focus on retrieving the list of friends for users that did set this information as “hidden” (to non-friends). We propose four different strategies to achieve this goal, and we evaluate them. The results of our thorough experiments show the feasibility of our strategies as well as their effectiveness: our approach is able to retrieve a significant percentage of the names of the “hidden” friends: i.e., some 25 % on average, and more than 70 % for some users.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/unipd.

  2. 2.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/7795542586.

  3. 3.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/2310323055.

  4. 4.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/programmersinpadua.

  5. 5.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/fiupd.

  6. 6.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/58159395664.

  7. 7.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/246910381993344.

  8. 8.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/159253824092728.

  9. 9.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/WWW.BLACKJACKCAFE.

  10. 10.

    http://www.facebook.com/groups/rhonyc.

  11. 11.

    http://www.skullsecurity.org.

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Acknowledgments

Mauro Conti is supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the European Commission under the agreement n. PCIG11-GA-2012-321980. This work has been partially supported by the TENACE PRIN Project 20103P34XC funded by the Italian MIUR, and by the Project “Tackling Mobile Malware with Innovative Machine Learning Techniques” funded by the University of Padua.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Andrea Burattin & Mauro Conti

  2. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Giuseppe Cascavilla

  3. VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Giuseppe Cascavilla

Authors
  1. Andrea Burattin
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  2. Giuseppe Cascavilla
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  3. Mauro Conti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giuseppe Cascavilla .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Málaga, Malaga, Spain

    Javier Lopez

  2. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

    Indrajit Ray

  3. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Bruno Crispo

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Burattin, A., Cascavilla, G., Conti, M. (2015). SocialSpy: Browsing (Supposedly) Hidden Information in Online Social Networks. In: Lopez, J., Ray, I., Crispo, B. (eds) Risks and Security of Internet and Systems. CRiSIS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17127-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17127-2_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17126-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17127-2

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