The distributed and open source social network Diaspora* extended with a formal privacy policy framework
- Try the new PPF-Diaspora* pod (https://ppf-diaspora.raulpardo.org). It runs the Diaspora* version of this repository, which implements some novel privacy policies. As usual in social networks users can define the audience of their posts, but they can also control their information when it is shared by others. In particular, a user can:
- Block or hide posts to undesired audiences in which they are mentioned.
- Block or hide posts to undesired audiences in which they are mentioned and include a location or a picture.
- Activate evolving privacy policies. These are policies that are activated at concrete moments in time. We offer:
- Within 24 hours, a user can enforce that at mosts 3 posts including his location will be published (the rests will be blocked).
- During the weekend, a user can decide that no posts including her pictures will be published.
This project is trying to implement a privacy enforcement mechanism to Diaspora. In particular, we are implementing the privacy policy framework described in [1]. This approach is able to describe fine-grained privacy policies and it is able to detect implicit leaks of information.
It is still a work in progress project. We are testing the feasibility of our approach in a real social network as Diaspora. Since a privacy mechanism as the one described in [1] could have some limitations in a production environment. If efficiently implemented, we would like to contribute to the main Diaspora project.
[1] - Pardo, Raúl, and Gerardo Schneider. "A Formal Privacy Policy Framework for Social Networks." Software Engineering and Formal Methods. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 378-392.