A Closer Look at Third-Party OSN Applications: Are They Leaking Your Personal Information?

Abdelberi Chaabane (1) , Yuan Ding (2) , Ratan Dey (2) , Mohamed Ali Kaafar (3) , Keith Ross (2)

1 PRIVATICS - Privacy Models, Architectures and Tools for the Information Society
2 NYU-Poly - Polytechnic institute of New York University
3 NICTA - National ICT Australia [Sydney]

We examine third-party Online Social Network (OSN) applications for two major OSNs: Facebook and RenRen. These third-party applications typically gather, from the OSN, user personal information. We develop a measurement platform to study the interaction between OSN applications and fourth parties. We use this platform to study the behavior of 997 Facebook applications and 377 RenRen applications. We find that the Facebook and RenRen applications interact with hundreds of different fourth-party tracking entities. More worrisome, 22\% of Facebook applications and 69\% of RenRen applications provide users' personal information to one or more fourth-party tracking entities.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Abdelberi Chaabane, Yuan Ding, Ratan Dey, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Keith Ross. A Closer Look at Third-Party OSN Applications: Are They Leaking Your Personal Information?. PAM 2014 - 15th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, Mar 2014, Los Angeles, United States. ⟨hal-00939175⟩