Thesis Projects with Ronald Leenes
Ronald Leenes of the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (Ronald teaches the course Law in Cyberspace)
has some topics in the field of Social Networking Sites (SNSs)
and privacy:
- Fading relations
The intensity of relationships we maintain in everyday life
fluctuates. One time close friends get out of touch and
consequently
they learn less and less of our current activities. In SNSs,
everyone
within a particular social group is attributed the same
'intensity',
is treated the same regarding to access to our information.
This is in
a sense is not a bug, but a feature of SNSs, it provides users
a
simple way to get back into the social loop whenever they
want. Yet on
the other hand this faculty of instant revising of
relationships poses
issues because it may be difficult for the individual to
manage both
manifest and latent relations. This action explores
relationship
dynamics by implementing mechanisms to display relationship
dynamic
metrics (visual indicators for group member activity over
time:
frequency of page views, contributions to group and profile,
etc) or
that manage group membership on the basis of activity of the
group
members over time. These mechanisms present interesting
privacy issues
because privacy gains for the profile owner seem to imply
privacy loss
for the group member whose behaviour needs to be monitored.
aim: explore group and relationship dynamics and privacy
- Verified SNS user accounts and credentials
SNS user enrolment may be restricted and user
accounts may be
complemented with certified attributes. For instance,
it may be useful/
necessary to be able to establish identity/name in an
SNS to avoid
identity take over (?friends? registering you on your
behalf), or to
associate certified age attributes to the user
account. This can be
implemented in many different ways. One would be a la
web of trust of
PGP approach where a real name is attached to a
random login only if
sufficiently many friends agree that the name should
be attached.
Implementation of these mechanisms allows user to
specify conditions
for group membership: such as this group is only open
to minors or
adults.
- Privacy issues awareness
This task aims to help users in deciding whether
posting particular
information incurs privacy risks. Does the provision
of information
regarding privacy risks affect the disclosure of
information? A way to
help users is to provide hints with regard to the
potential audience
of the user?s post and personal data and how
identifiable the user is.