TY - GEN
T1 - Privacy, availability and economics in the Polaris mobile social network
AU - Wilson, Christo
AU - Steinbauer, Troy
AU - Wang, Gang
AU - Sala, Alessandra
AU - Zheng, Haitao
AU - Zhao, Ben Y.
PY - 2011/12/1
Y1 - 2011/12/1
N2 - While highly successful, today's online social networks (OSNs) have made a conscious decision to sacrifice privacy for availability and centralized control. Unfortunately, tradeoffs in this "walled garden" architecture naturally pit the economic interests of OSN providers against the privacy goals of OSN users, a battle that users cannot win. While some alternative OSN designs preserve user control over data, they do so by de-prioritizing issues of economic incentives and sustainability. In contrast, we believe any practical alternative to today's centralized architecture must consider incentives for providers as a key goal. In this paper, we propose a distributed OSN architecture that significantly improves user privacy while preserving economic incentives for OSN providers. We do so by using a standardized API to create a competitive provider marketplace for different components of the OSN, thus allowing users to perform their own tradeoffs between cost, performance, and privacy. We describe Polaris, a system where users leverage smartphones as a highly available identity provider and access control manager, and use application prototypes to show how it allows data monetization while limiting the visibility of any single party to users' private data.
AB - While highly successful, today's online social networks (OSNs) have made a conscious decision to sacrifice privacy for availability and centralized control. Unfortunately, tradeoffs in this "walled garden" architecture naturally pit the economic interests of OSN providers against the privacy goals of OSN users, a battle that users cannot win. While some alternative OSN designs preserve user control over data, they do so by de-prioritizing issues of economic incentives and sustainability. In contrast, we believe any practical alternative to today's centralized architecture must consider incentives for providers as a key goal. In this paper, we propose a distributed OSN architecture that significantly improves user privacy while preserving economic incentives for OSN providers. We do so by using a standardized API to create a competitive provider marketplace for different components of the OSN, thus allowing users to perform their own tradeoffs between cost, performance, and privacy. We describe Polaris, a system where users leverage smartphones as a highly available identity provider and access control manager, and use application prototypes to show how it allows data monetization while limiting the visibility of any single party to users' private data.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84860750218&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84860750218&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2184489.2184499
DO - 10.1145/2184489.2184499
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84860750218
SN - 9781450306492
T3 - HotMobile 2011: The 12th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
SP - 42
EP - 47
BT - HotMobile 2011
T2 - 12th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, HotMobile 2011
Y2 - 1 March 2011 through 2 March 2011
ER -