NYOB: A novel approach to addressing Privacy concerns in Online Social Networks - Essay Example

NYOB: A novel approach to addressing Privacy concerns in Online Social Networks Online social networking is an increasingly powerful tool of social communication and marketing that cannot be ignored by the corporate world any longer. However, this tool still continues to be marred with questionable privacy capabilities, making it difficult for corporate houses to use it to share confidential or sensitive information. This report is about NYOB (None of Your Business), a new approach that promises to ensure privacy along with retaining the key functionality offered by the online services.

The NYOB approach has three goals: (a) Preservation of privacy. (b) The incremental deployment of the approach in small user groups, without any cooperation from the online service provider. (c) Difficult to detect. By letting the NYOB users blend in with the others, it makes it difficult for the online service to act in a hostile manner against this user group. Essentially, NOYB operates by dividing private information into multiple "atoms," and then replacing each atom with its encryption.

At the core, if all the atoms of the same class compose a "dictionary," NOYB encrypts the index of the user's atom in this dictionary, and uses the ciphered index to pick the replacement atom from the dictionary. The approach is superior to other approaches because the cipher atom is a legitimate atom. NOYB sends data across four channels: the management channel, the public channel, the online network, and the residue channel. NYOB in its preliminary stage uses Facebook online social networking to demonstrate its capabilities.

The ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy reinforces the stand of NYOB in finding alternative solutions to privacy issues on social networking sites such as the Facebook. (1) To summarize, it is certainly possible to address the privacy concerns arising from the use of online social networks. NYOB is a strong case in point, and the actual realization of this goal does not seem to be too far in sight. Sources: (1)