Challenges to Privacy in Social Networking Mashups: Social TV as a Case Study

Social networking provides opportunities to expand the nature of existing applications and user activities in cyberspace. Consider the idea of "social TV". Along with these opportunities to combine activities such as social networking and TV or entertainment, comes an interesting set of challenges to the privacy of identity information. In this paper we will examine a key set of these challenges. These include issues of merged identities, inference across identities, merged privacy policies, and flow of information among the composition identity management systems involved in a new composite application service. We conclude with a set of observations to keep in mind when designing such a composition or mashup of existing services, especially with respect to identity and privacy.