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From False-Free to Privacy-Oriented Communitarian Microblogging Social Networks

Published:17 February 2023Publication History
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Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have gained enormous popularity in recent years. They provide a dynamic platform for sharing content (text messages or multimedia) and for facilitating communication between friends and acquaintances. Microblogging services are a popular form of OSNs. They allow sending small messages in a one-to-many messaging model so that users can communicate with their favorite celebrity, brand, politician, or other regular users without the obligation of a pre-existing social relationship. A chain of privacy-related scandals linked to questionable data handling practices in microblogging services has arisen in the last past few years. Most current microblogging service providers offer centralized services and their business model is based on monitoring, analyzing, and selling users’ activity and patterns. In the end, the personal information shared by the users to benefit from the free-of-charge services is used for the underlying payment in such systems. In this paper, we present Garlanet, a privacy-aware censorship-resistant microblogging social network that does not rely on a centralized service provider as all data is hosted in computers voluntarily contributed by the users of the system. Garlanet provides microblogging functionalities while protecting privacy and preserving the confidentiality and integrity of users and data. It ensures that users’ identities and their social graphs are hidden from the system and adversaries and it provides availability and scalability of the services. We also evaluate the privacy level of Garlanet and we compare it with the privacy level of eight other microblogging systems.

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                  • Published in

                    cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
                    ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 19, Issue 2s
                    April 2023
                    545 pages
                    ISSN:1551-6857
                    EISSN:1551-6865
                    DOI:10.1145/3572861
                    • Editor:
                    • Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
                    Issue’s Table of Contents

                    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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                    Association for Computing Machinery

                    New York, NY, United States

                    Publication History

                    • Published: 17 February 2023
                    • Online AM: 27 August 2022
                    • Accepted: 20 July 2022
                    • Revised: 2 December 2021
                    • Received: 14 September 2020
                    Published in tomm Volume 19, Issue 2s

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