One of the huge security risks involved with Facebook is when users agree to give up security rights to third-party developers in exchange for the privilege of playing their apps, which are generally games. Now, Heng Xu, assistant professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State, has led a team that has created an app that sits between users and third party apps, and allows users to designate which parts of their private information the app can have access so as to prevent them from gaining access to all the users private information. According to the Economic Times, the app, not yet available for the general public, will be a sort of pop-up guardian, that will allows users to specify what they want, rather than helplessly doling out rights to their private information.
According to the Times, the majority of Facebook users that they if they set their global rights in Facebook, they’re protected, no matter what third party apps makers decide to do. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While apps makers can surely declare when users sign in that they will never use their data for anything other than what the app needs, many don’t stand by those promises and sell user information to other third-parties, violating user privacy.
With the new app, users would be told which rights are being asked for and then given the option of allowing rights to just that data, giving them far more control over the private stuff they have in their Facebook profiles and other pages.
The research team has built a working product and have demonstrated it at this year’s Association for Computer Machinery Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, meeting in Boston, where actual Facebook users were given a go at trying it out and most were asked their opinion about what they thought of the interface, and were even given different options to help the researchers decide on a final look and feel before launching it as a public product.
Members of the team also pointed out that a lot of people who use Facebook are unaware of the fact that they may be inadvertently giving away private information about their friends when they give up their privacy rights to third party apps. Though people in the apps business are well aware of it, and are making profits from selling such information to advertisers and other companies looking for a way to market their online products.