Abstract
We examine third-party Online Social Network (OSN) applications for two major OSNs: Facebook and RenRen. These third-party applications typically gather, from the OSN, user personal information. We develop a measurement platform to study the interaction between OSN applications and fourth parties. We use this platform to study the behavior of 997 Facebook applications and 377 RenRen applications. We find that the Facebook and RenRen applications interact with hundreds of different fourth-party tracking entities. More worrisome, 22% of Facebook applications and 69% of RenRen applications provide users’ personal information to one or more fourth-party tracking entities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chaabane, A., Kaafar, M.A., Boreli, R.: Big friend is watching you: Analyzing online social networks tracking capabilities. In: WOSN (2012)
Chia, P.H., Yamamoto, Y., Asokan, N.: Is this app safe?: A large scale study on application permissions and risk signals. In: WWW (2012)
Dey, R., Jelveh, Z., Ross, K.: Facebook users have become much more private: A large-scale study. In: PERCOM Workshops (2012)
Frank, M., Dong, B., Porter Felt, A., Song, D.: Mining permission request patterns from Android and Facebook applications. In: ICDM (2012)
Krishnamurthy, B., Wills, C.E.: Characterizing privacy in online social networks. In: WOSN (2008)
Krishnamurthy, B., Wills, C.E.: On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks. In: WOSN (2009)
Mayer, J.R., Mitchell, J.C.: Third-party web tracking: Policy and technology. In: S&P (2012)
Perito, D., Castelluccia, C., Kaafar, M.A., Manils, P.: How unique and traceable are usernames? In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Hopper, N. (eds.) PETS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6794, pp. 1–17. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Xia, N., Song, H., Liao, Y., Iliofotou, M., Nucci, A., Zhang, Z., Kuzmanovic, A.: Mosaic: Quantifying privacy leakage in mobile networks. In: SIGCOMM (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chaabane, A., Ding, Y., Dey, R., Kaafar, M.A., Ross, K.W. (2014). A Closer Look at Third-Party OSN Applications: Are They Leaking Your Personal Information?. In: Faloutsos, M., Kuzmanovic, A. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8362. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04918-2_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04918-2_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04917-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04918-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)