Article

Privacy-preserving social plugins

Authors:

Georgios Kontaxis,

Michalis Polychronakis,

Angelos D. Keromytis,

Evangelos P. MarkatosAuthors Info & Claims

Security'12: Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium

Page 30

Published: 08 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The widespread adoption of social plugins, such as Facebook's Like and Google's +1 buttons, has raised concerns about their implications to user privacy, as they enable social networking services to track a growing part of their members' browsing activity. Existing mitigations in the form of browser extensions can prevent social plugins from tracking user visits, but inevitably disable any kind of content personalization, ruining the user experience.

In this paper we propose a novel design for privacy-preserving social plugins that decouples the retrieval of user-specific content from the loading of a social plugin. In contrast to existing solutions, this design preserves the functionality of existing social plugins by delivering the same personalized content, while it protects user privacy by avoiding the transmission of user-identifying information at load time. We have implemented our design in SafeButton, an add-on for Firefox that fully supports seven out of the nine social plugins currently provided by Facebook, including the Like button, and partially due to API restrictions the other two. As privacy-preserving social plugins maintain the functionality of existing social plugins, we envisage that they could be adopted by social networking services themselves for the benefit of their members. To that end, we also present a pure JavaScript design that can be offered transparently as a service without the need to install any browser add-ons.

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Cited By

Papadopoulos PPapadogiannakis APolychronakis MMarkatos E(2019)Is Privacy possible without Anonymity?Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Systems Security10.1145/3301417.3312498(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3301417.3312498
Papadopoulos PKourtellis NRodriguez PLaoutaris NUhlig SMaennel O(2017)If you are not paying for it, you are the productProceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3131365.3131397(142-156)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131365.3131397
Papadopoulos EDiamantaris MPapadopoulos PPetsas TIoannidis SMarkatos EBarrett RCummings RAgichtein EGabrilovich E(2017)The Long-Standing Privacy DebateProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/3038912.3052691(153-162)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3038912.3052691
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Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

Security'12: Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium

August 2012

43 pages

Program Chair:
Tadayoshi Kohno
University of Washington

Sponsors

NSF: National Science Foundation
Google Inc.
IBMR: IBM Research
Microsoft Research: Microsoft Research
Symantec: Symantec

Publisher

USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 08 August 2012

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Cited By

Papadopoulos PPapadogiannakis APolychronakis MMarkatos E(2019)Is Privacy possible without Anonymity?Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Systems Security10.1145/3301417.3312498(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3301417.3312498
Papadopoulos PKourtellis NRodriguez PLaoutaris NUhlig SMaennel O(2017)If you are not paying for it, you are the productProceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3131365.3131397(142-156)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131365.3131397
Papadopoulos EDiamantaris MPapadopoulos PPetsas TIoannidis SMarkatos EBarrett RCummings RAgichtein EGabrilovich E(2017)The Long-Standing Privacy DebateProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/3038912.3052691(153-162)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3038912.3052691
Lau BChung SSong CJang YLee WBoldyreva AFu K(2014)Mimesis aegisProceedings of the 23rd USENIX conference on Security Symposium10.5555/2671225.2671228(33-48)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2671225.2671228
Polakis IIlia PMaggi FLancini MKontaxis GZanero SIoannidis SKeromytis AAhn GYung MLi N(2014)Faces in the Distorting MirrorProceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2660267.2660317(501-512)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660317
Han SLiu VPu QPeter SAnderson TKrishnamurthy AWetherall D(2013)Expressive privacy control with pseudonymsACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/2534169.248603243:4(291-302)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2534169.2486032
Han SLiu VPu QPeter SAnderson TKrishnamurthy AWetherall DChiu DWang JBarford PSeshan S(2013)Expressive privacy control with pseudonymsProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM10.1145/2486001.2486032(291-302)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2013
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Pappas VKemerlis VZavou APolychronakis MKeromytis A(2013)CloudFenceProceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses - Volume 814510.1007/978-3-642-41284-4_21(411-431)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2013
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