Enabling Interoperable and Selective Data Sharing among Social Networking Sites

Abstract

With the widespread use of social networking (SN) sites and even introduction of a social component in non-social oriented services, there is a growing concern over user privacy in general, how to handle and share user profiles across SN sites in particular. Although there have been several proprietary or open source-based approaches to unifying the creation of third party applications, the availability and retrieval of user profile information are still limited to the site where the third party application is run, mostly devoid of the support for data interoperability. In this paper we propose an approach to enabling interopearable and selective data sharing among SN sites. To support selective data sharing, we discuss an authenticated dictionary (ADT)-based credential which enables a user to share only a subset of her information certified by external SN sites with applications running on an SN site. For interoperable data sharing, we propose an extension to the OpenSocial API so that it can provide an open source-based framework for allowing the ADT-based credential to be used seamlessly among different SN sites.