New Facebook app restricts questionable “friends”
A new application for Facebook provides three added levels of protection for users and may be helpful specifically for parents of teen users.
The Social Privacy Protector (SPP), developed by undergraduate students at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), “scans the user friends list,” explained Michael Fire, a Ph.D. candidate in BGU’s Department of Information Systems Engineering. “For each friend, our application calculates how many common features the user and the friend have in common, such as common friends, tagged photos, messages and other attributes. According to the results and by using our developed algorithm, the application recommends which friends need to be restricted.”
The SPP site states that Facebook is the “biggest social network” with over “901 million active users,” and that “36% of Facebook users exposed personal information.” The students’ project developed three tools to enhance security and privacy. They added privacy settings for children, celebrities and recommended settings and a “friends classifier” that analyzes “friends” who may be a risk and are recommended to be placed on a restricted list. An “application classifier” also cites installed Facebook applications that may pose a threat to privacy.
“We decided to create the application in order to better protect unaware Facebook users that tend to accept friend requests from people they do not know,” emphasized Fire. “Recent studies in the field of privacy found that 80% of the users will accept friend requests from people they do not know if they have more than 11 friends in common. Moreover, Facebook estimates that around five to six percent of its users could be false or duplicate accounts.”
Two fourth year students, Dima Kagan and Aviad Elishar of BGU’s Telekom Innovation Laboratories and Information Systems Engineering Department worked with Fire and Professor Yuval Elovici, on the app, based on their social network research.
“The application is for everyone who uses Facebook and think that they have too many friends,” noted Fire. “We also have a special option for parents which can better protect their children’s privacy in one simple click.” It is currently available for Facebook and Firefox, but not for mobile devices.
“This app is a very good idea,” said Arthur Carp, Vice President of Operations at Quantalytics, Inc. “It looks like they have made a beginning, but are far from a mature product.” He cited NetNanny as a “mature product” for protecting children on the Web and Facebook, but noted that they “do not have a feature to examine friend relationships and identify dubious friends like the Ben-Gurion product.” He noted the lack of coverage on mobile devices as a draw back. “It is useful,” he added, “and there is a need now for it. However, there are additional areas (phones, etc.) that need the same coverage that this software provides.”
“The great advantage of our application,” Fire pointed out, “is that you can remove friends without unfriending them and hurting their feelings. So I believe that almost everyone can enjoy the application without age limit.”
More information can be found at http://socialprotector.net/wordpress/.
The Facebook application can be downloaded from http://apps.facebook.com/friend_analyzer_app/ and the Firefox Addon can be downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/157027/social_privacy_protector-1.1.1.1-fx-windows.xpi
YouTube movie with explanations can be found at http://socialprotector.net/wordpress/?page_id=213
