FaceCloak: An Architecture for User Privacy on Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Flickr, are gaining more and more popularity among Internet users. As users are enjoying this new style of networking, privacy concerns are also attracting increasing public attention due to reports about privacy breaches on social networking sites. The authors propose FaceCloak, an architecture that protects user privacy on a social networking site by shielding a user's personal information from the site and from other users that were not explicitly authorized by the user. At the same time, FaceCloak seamlessly maintains usability of the site's services.