Enabling private conversations on Twitter

Abstract

User privacy has been an increasingly growing concern in online social networks (OSNs). While most OSNs today provide some form of privacy controls so that their users can protect their shared content from other users, these controls are typically not sufficiently expressive and/or do not provide fine-grained protection of information. In this paper, we consider the introduction of a new privacy control-group messaging on Twitter, with users having finegrained control over who can see their messages. Specifically, we demonstrate that such a privacy control can be offered to users of Twitter today without having to wait for Twitter to make changes to its system. We do so by designing and implementing Twitsper, a wrapper around Twitter that enables private group communication among existing Twitter users while preserving Twitter's commercial interests. Our design preserves the privacy of group information (i.e., who communicates with whom) both from the Twitsper server as well as from undesired Twitsper users. Furthermore, our evaluation shows that our implementation of Twitsper imposes minimal server-side bandwidth requirements and incurs low client-side energy consumption. Our Twitsper client for Androidbased devices has been downloaded by over 1000 users and its utility has been noted by several media articles.

A Survey of Social Network Forensics

“…Wang & Nepali, 2013) or protecting privacy by concealing users privacy (I. Singh et al, 2012;Sayaf et al, 2013) may require tools to be implemented for protection of users' privacy. Moreover, Irani, Webb, et al (2011) suggest that account recovery services should indicate how strong account recovery questions are.…”

Arcana: Enabling Private Posts on Public Microblog Platforms

“…Unlike other existing approaches [3,12,28], we do not need a trusted third-party, a private server, nor any other platform with storage or access control capabilities. With the "private tweet" function of Arcana, a user can conveniently send a private tweet to a designated subset of followers and maintain full control of it (i.e., she can delete it later).…”