Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Privacy Plug-In being developed for Facebook

FaceCloak, implemented as a plug-in for Mozilla's Firefox browser, allows a user to designate--using two "at" signs ("@@"), by default--what information should be encrypted and only made available to friends. A FaceCloak user holds a secret access key but also sends two other keys to her friends. Those keys are then used to access the real information, which is held on a separate server. While the same concept could be used on other social networks--such as Twitter and MySpace--Hengartner and his colleagues focused on the largest provider.