PESAP: A Privacy Enhanced Social Application Platform

Nowadays, social networking sites provide third party application developers with means to access their social graph, by providing a social application platform. Through their users, these developers acquire a significant set of personal information from the social graph. The current protection mechanisms, such as privacy policies and access control mechanisms fall short on protecting the privacy of the users. In this paper we present a framework for a privacy enhanced social application platform, called PESAP, that technically enforces the protection of the personal information of a user, when interacting with social applications. The framework is based on two pillars: anonymization of the social graph and secure information flow inside the browser. PESAP is targeted to be as compatible as possible with the current state-of-the-art design of social application platforms, while technically enforcing the protection of user privacy. We evaluate this compliance, based on a classification of applications in different categories.