Online Social Networks For The People, By The People

David Koll, University of Göttingen, Germany

Tuesday, February 18th, 2014 at 10:15.

Polacksbacken, room 1145

Concomitant with the tremendous growth of online social networking (OSN) platforms are increasing concerns from users about their privacy and the protection of their data. As user data management is usually centralized, OSN providers nowadays have the unprecedented privilege to access every user´s private data, which makes large-scale privacy leakage at a single site possible.

One way to address this issue is to decentralize user data management and replicate user data at individual
end-user machines across the OSN. However, such an approach faces new challenges. While recent works in this direction only show limited success in addressing these challenges, we introduce the Self-Organized Universe of People (SOUP), a different approach that exchanges recommendations among friends in order to effectively distribute and manage encrypted user data replicas throughout the OSN. An extensive evaluation by simulation and a real-world deployment shows the benefits SOUP yields over previous approaches."

David is currently a 3rd year PhD student at University of Göttingen, Germany. His main research focus are computer networks, in particular on online social networks and overlay/peer-to-peer networks. He has also been a visiting researcher to University of Oregon, USA and Fudan University, China in 2012.