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

  • Andrea Burattin
  • Giuseppe Cascavilla
  • Mauro Conti
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8924)

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

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.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Andrea Burattin
    • 1
  • Giuseppe Cascavilla
    • 2
    • 3
  • Mauro Conti
    • 1
  1. 1.University of PadovaPaduaItaly
  2. 2.University of L’AquilaL’AquilaItaly
  3. 3.VU UniversityAmsterdamThe Netherlands

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