At Ben Gurion University of the Negev, two students have worked out a new security app for Facebook. The users can maintain privacy with this app and keep hackers and attackers away.
The students from the Department of Information Systems Engineering have developed software called Social Privacy Protector (SPP) for Facebook. The app is based on research they have done on social networks as curriculum of their final year project.
Most people use Facebook for the purpose of sharing information with friends. Building up a friends list has become big activity particularly with the younger members on Facebook and it is not strange to come across teens with more than thousand friends on their list. Recent study has revealed that eighty per cent of Facebook users will accept friendship from unknown persons and this can become a possible potential threat to their privacy.
The personal information exposed on Facebook is of enormous magnitude. The software app is available also as an add-on for Firefox. It contains three layers of protection that improve user privacy. The first layer is used to identify a user’s friends who pose a threat and then to restrict that friend’s exposure to the user’s personal information. The second layer is an extension of Facebook’s basic privacy settings and it is based on several types of social network usage profiles. The third layer alerts a user about the number of installed applications on their Facebook profile that have access to their personal information.
SPP will analyze the user’s connections and categorize the friends into organic groups that they belong to and how often they communicate. It will assess the nature of their posts and who responds to them. Users are given a score based on the connection strength between their friends and themselves. The lower the score is, the more suspicious the connection becomes. The app then identifies the connections that scored low and advises `unfriending’ them.
Install Facebook Social Privacy Protector