Protect user privacy on Facebook
Welcome to FaceCloak, a research project led by Prof. Urs Hengartner.
FaceCloak is an architecture for protecting user privacy on social networking sites, as introduced in the following paper:
Luo, W., Xie, Q., and Hengartner, U., FaceCloak: An Architecture for User Privacy on Social Networking Sites. Proc. of 2009 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT-09), Vancouver, BC, August 2009, pp. 26-33.
Users of social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, need to trust a site to properly deal with their personal information. Unfortunately, this trust is not always justified. FaceCloak is a Firefox extension that replaces your personal information with fake information before sending it to a social networking site. Your actual personal information is encrypted and stored securely somewhere else. Only friends who were explicitly authorized by you have access to this information, and FaceCloak transparently replaces the fake information while your friends are viewing your profile.
FaceCloak was mentioned in MIT's Technology Review, Slashdot, CTV News, and Imprint.
Please note that the implementation of FaceCloak provided here is at an early stage. It works only for the Facebook social networking site and is targeted at developers, not at regular Facebook users. Due to our limited resources, we cannot promise that the implementation provided here will keep up with the changes made by Facebook to its website.