LERSAIS Study Demonstrates Security Risks, Privacy Concerns in Facebook's Mutual Friends
A recent study at the University of Pittsburgh has found that Facebook's mutual friends feature "creates myriad security risks and privacy concerns." Even though users may adjust their privacy settings, the mutual friends feature can facilitate the disclosure of information that is intended to be private. The study was carried out by Dr. James Joshi, Mohd Anwar (formerly a Pitt faculty member and currently an assistant professor at North Carolina A&T State University), and Lei Jin (a PhD candidate in Pitt's School of Information Sciences). The paper, "Mutual-friend Based attacks in Social Network Systems," has been published April 22 in Computers & Security. (Read the full article.)