A Fairy Tale

26.2.2008 von admin.

This fairly tale is about a girl called Little Red Surfing Hood. The girl one day is surfing through the Internet and through some of her social network profiles. She actually plans to visit her grandmother later that day. All of a sudden, a message pops up on her screen from a user with the profile name “wolf”. He plans to discover as much about the girl and her grandmother as possible and pretends to be a very cute boy going to the same school as Little Red Surfing Hood. He asks all kinds of questions, sends her a link request and asks for a picture of her. She naïvely links him to her profile and also sends him a picture. Little Red Surfing Hood is really happy to have made a new friend. In the meantime, wolf assembles various credentials about Little Red Surfing Hood making use of details revealed on her profile, pictures, and personal details such as her address, Email, a mobile phone number and the route she always takes to go to her grandmother. With those credentials, he goes to the girl’s grandmother’s house, gains entry by pretending to be the girl. The rest of the fairy tale is known. The wolf eats the grandmother and later on the girl as well. There are different story endings how the girl and her grandmother were rescued by a hunter. But that is not the point of the story here. We don’t even know who the hunter was, how he found out about the wolf in the grandmother’s house and for what purpose he was into this.

Information privacy in social network applications means more than allowing certain people to see your profile. First, it means to have a way to really know the true identity of the person talking or connecting to you. Secondly, it means to have full transparency over what you and what others are doing. What happens if you upload a certain piece of data to your social network profile? Who can see which part of your profile data, who is connected to it and who uses your data for which purpose? This, of course, includes the service providers and any third parties (including the hunter). And finally, it means to determine for yourself, how your personal data is linked, exported, assembled and analyzed in which context and by whom.

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