Privacy issues in social networking platforms: comparative study of facebook developers platform and opensocial

Most of the privacy research in online social networks has focused on protecting profile information of users from other users of online social networks. Another equally important research area is protection of users profile information from social applications. With the introduction of the Google´s OpenSocial and Facebook´s Developer Platform millions of third party developers are building thousands of social applications for existing massive user base. This fact poses serious privacy risk because current social networking platforms don´t provide any mechanism to control disclosure of user´s personal information to social applications and their developers. In this paper, we investigate two very popular social networking platform s, i.e. Facebook Developers Platform and OpenSocial. We demonstrate inherit flaws in these social networking platforms. We also point out limitations in existing solutions to the problem suggested by researcher community in the area. We recognise the need for extension of current APIs available for these social networking platforms so that extended version of APIs provide fine grain access control to the user of online social networks.