LotusNet: Tunable privacy for distributed online social network services

The evolution of the role of online social networks in the Web has led to a collision between private, public and commercial spheres that have been inevitably connected together in social networking services since their beginning. The growing awareness on the opaque data management operated by many providers reveals that a privacy-aware service that protects user information from privacy leaks would be very attractive for a consistent portion of users. In order to meet this need we propose LotusNet, a framework for the development of social network services relying on a peer-to-peer paradigm which supports strong user authentication. We tackle the trade-off problem between security, privacy and services in distributed social networks by providing the users the possibility to tune their privacy settings through a very flexible and fine-grained access control system. Moreover, our architecture is provided with a powerful suite of high-level services that greatly facilitates custom application development and mash up. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.