Enabling Privacy as a Fundamental Construct for Social Networks

The current set of social networking platforms, e.g. Facebook and MySpace, has created a new class of Internet applications called social software. These systems focus on leveraging the real life relationships of people and augment them with the facilities and the richness of the Web. The large number of social applications and the even larger user populations of these social networks are proving that this new class of software is useful and complements modern life. However, social platforms and software are not without drawbacks and significant concerns. One of the most important considerations is the need to allow strong security and privacy protections. In addition, these protections need to be easy to use and apply uniformly across platforms and applications.