Privacy in Mobile Social Networks - Essay Example

Running head: PRIVACY IN MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKS Student name: Student number: Course title: Lecturer: Date: List of abbreviations HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol ID: Identity SSL: Secure Socket Layer HTTPS: HTTP with Secure Socket Layer Table of Contents List of abbreviations 2 Table of Contents 3 1. Introduction 4 1.1 Mobile computing 5 1.2 Social networks 5 2.0 Privacy and security 6 2.1 Direct anonymity issues 6 2.2 The indirect issue (K-Anonymity) 7 2.3 Eavesdropping and spoofing 8 Conclusion 9 References 10 1. Introduction Information from the social networks has found its use in many ways which was not expected in the beginning. One important development in this is the fact that there Smartphones which are able to show the location where someone is. They are able to show the private information of the user. However, the models that are there today will need the users of these devices to compromise their privacy and security. This paper will give these issues that come with the use mobile networks. The paper will also give some frameworks in which the solutions to these can be achieved. The main focus of this paper will be on privacy on the social networks. The social networks that are online are used by many people around the world today. These networks have become a platform for communication in the world today. There are many applications which have been developed on top of these networks. The availability of social relation and the preferences are found in these networks have allowed the development of applications that we have not seen before. Another addition is the fact that the social network information about the owners of the devices has enabled the location and other information for these users to be made available on the online community which enables others to view the relationships and he location of the owners. This is worrying when private issues are concerned. The growth of applications which brings together online social networks and mobile computing applications has enabled the occurrence of applications which are unique in their requirements and also which are hard to understand because they are hard to understand (Eagle, & Pentland, 2005). 1.1 Mobile computing There are Smartphone which allow people to be connected to the Internet all the time and also are able to support mature development environments for applications which are developed by third-parties. This development has made the computing power to the hands of users and also allowed them to access online information on the Internet. In universities, there are many users of the Smartphones and make use of the social networks most of the time. Of late, there has been an increase of Smartphones which are able to access the Internet and wireless phones; this has also made use of applications which run on these networks. This increase has been attributed to the rise of iPhones and iPod Touch. Statistics show that the devices that are hand-held from Apple accounted for two-thirds of mobile Internet traffic in April 2009. This was eight times the traffic from those competing with them. This is interesting given the fact that nearly a year before this, iPhone were not even considered a force for mobile platform. 1.2 Social networks Social networks have exploded in the last two years. Of particular interest is the growth of Facebook which has found acceptance and used by many people from different backgrounds and age. According to Facebook’s page that has statistics, there are more than 200 million active users and also that those who visit the site are100 million everyday (Facebook statistics). Compared to Internet access statistics, it can be said that every 1 person of 10 Internet users access Facebook everyday and also that the Facebook active users are larger tan any country’s Internet users; for this case, China has been found to be the largest with Internet users of 179.7. Particular interest is mobile users are the most active users of Facebook. Facebook statistics show that there are over 30 million active mobile users of Facebook and they are considered be 50 % more active than those who do not use the mobile. 2.0 Privacy and security Previous research based privacy on being able to disclose the privacy of someone’s location and also sharing location and time. The mobile networks which are peer-to-peer exchange the identifiers of the users between the devices using short-range wireless technology like Bluetooth. On the other hands a mobile device which uses a client-server network system will first of all notify the server of the new location of the device. They will make use of the towers and GPS. They can also make a query to the server concerning the users and the information of interest about these users. This paper will address the privacy issues between peer-to-peer mobile network and client-server architectures. Because there a difference in this network, it will indicate which network is being talked about (Capkun et al., 2008). 2.1 Direct anonymity issues The applications that are found in the mobile networks offer little protection on the users. The systems will require the users to allow their personal information to be accessed and also allow that information to be used to identify that user. An example is that Facebook will require the users to agree to allow Facebook to access their personal information through the application program interface of Facebook (Beach, Gartrell, & Han, 2009). In the peer-to-peer mobile network architectures, anyone who is close to a mobile user cam make use of Bluetooth device to get the identity of the user in the social network and also be able to access the data that has been sent to the network directly through a wireless connection. This is because the data that is sent on the wireless network is clear and can be accessed by anyone. In the pee-to-peer mobile networks, it is possible to track the user of the mobile user by following the dates that the clients have accessed the wireless network and also using the user’s network ID to find out the times that they have been accessing the Internet. Using these logs, it is possible to track places where the user has visited and also the number of times they have visited these locations which is contravening the privacy of the mobile users. Another issue which is wrong is that the user’s network ID can be used by an outsider to view the public information of the user in a way that user may not want which is also wrong (Bezzi, 2010). It is therefore evident that allowing the network ID from the social network’s website is wrong and compromises the privacy of an individual. These problems that directly compromise the user’s privacy direct anonymity attacks (Zhao, Lin, & Liu, 2011). Direct anonymity attacks are also possible in the client-server mobile networks. While it is not possible to track the user directly in the client-server architecture, it is still very possible to use date logging to find out the times and the frequency that the users found users who located in the neighborhood. Given the fact that the devices that are found in these networks can be used to find the full names and the users who are near, the privacy of the users in the neighborhood is also put at risk by these intrusions. This way, the network compromises the privacy of the user in this sense as their private information is being shown to many people (Flaherty et al., 1996). 2.2 The indirect issue (K-Anonymity) One challenge that is important to be pursued is providing many applications that are used n the network and without compromising the privacy of the users in that network. Even if the user did not provide the personal information on the social network, the social information that is provided by the user like the preferences, they can be mapped back and the information brought together to provide some very important information that could also compromise the privacy of the user. Some piece of information may be sent to the server and this information could be used to invade the privacy of the user. If, for example, information like favorite movies is given out, this information could be mapped back to the user. K-Anonymity occurs when n pieces of information or data can be used to map to the user (Chander et al., 2008). 2.3 Eavesdropping and spoofing When the network ID of a user has been intercepted, it can easily be used to send spoofy attacks. As a user who is masquerading, they will pretend as if they are the user whose information has been intercepted and will do bad things to the other users and thus compromise the privacy of the users (Kelsey, 2010). In a spoofing attack, the ID which has been intercepted will be replayed in the network for a long time and thus maliciously repeating the attack in the network. Another type of attack which replays is called the wormhole attack; in this case, one end of the wireless transmission is captured and is ten replayed on the other end. In peer-to-peer networked, a user who has bad intentions will capture the ID a user and use it in other networks and thus can perform bad things on those other network. The other networks can be distant. These attacks are very bad and offer very serious crimes. One user who is pretending to be the compromised user will use the information to commit crime and in so doing presents a very serious crime that needs to be looked into (Connolly, 2003). Another serious crime that could be committed is that of looking at information that is transmitted in a wireless network when a user device asks the user to provide their personal information from a server. An example is that if a mobile device uses HTTP to connect to the Facebook API REST server, instead of using HTTPS, all the information that is requested by the Facebook application will be sent in cleartext and therefore will stand very high chances of being intercepted. Intercepting this information will make the interceptor to make Facebook to show information which they were not willing to show in the network. Eavesdropping, spoofing and wormhole attacks are not major threats in client-server architectures. This is because these systems have strong security systems because they can use SSL to defend the network from being attacked. If the users of the application shave used strong passwords and have kept these passwords to themselves, then it is hard to intercept their private information. Conclusion With the rise of Internet use using mobile devises, there is a lot to be desired as many people get connected to the Internet and probably will want to be online. There should be effort by the private sector and also the governments to ensure that there are security frameworks to protect users from the attacks. The fear of compromising the private information should not alienate users from making use of mobile networks. The users should embrace mobile Internet connectivity without having to fear security. There are seen to be done by many towards having a secure system. References Eagle, B, & Pentland, A 2005, Social serendipity: Mobilizing social software, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 45. Capkun, K, Rasmussen, M, Cagalj, & Srivastava, M 2008, Secure location verification with hidden and mobile base stations, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 470–483. Beach, A, Gartrell, M, & Han, R 2009, Solutions to security and privacy issues in mobile social networking, retrieved on 5th April 2011 from http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~rhan/Papers/smw09_solutions_security_privacy.pdf Bezzi, M 2010, Privacy and identity management for life, Springer, New York. Zhao, H, Lin, W, & Liu, K 2011, Behavior dynamics in media-sharing social networks, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kelsey, T 2010, Social networking spaces: From Facebook to Twitter and everything in between, Apress, Canada. Chander, A, Gelman, L, & Radin, M 2008, Securing privacy in the Internet age, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Connolly, K 2003, Law of the Internet security and privacy, Aspen Publishers Online, New York. Flaherty, D, British Colombia, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, 1996, Privacy on the Internet, British Publishers, Colombia. Facebook statistics, retrieved on 13th March 2011 from http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php? Read More