Communications of the ACM
Stanford Lab Yields New Privacy-Based Social Network
The new Omlet social network will allow users to completely control their personal data, researchers say.
Credit: Stanford Report (CA)
Stanford University researchers from the School of Engineering's MobiSocial Lab have created the Omlet social network to allow users complete control over their personal data. The team believes Omlet is the first venture of the "privacy economy," based on the idea that a healthy industry can be created around the principle of protecting users' privacy.
"With news of [U.S. National Security Agency] eavesdropping and the ever-inscrutable, ever-evolving privacy policies of proprietary social networks, the public is increasingly and understandably concerned about where, when, and how their personal information is being used," says Stanford professor and MobiSocial lab founder Monica Lam.
Omlet is a distributed semantic file system, meaning its decentralized data storage is not under the control of any single network. Data instead exists as indexed private files stored on a member's choice of personal cloud storage services. Users are not bound to any particular cloud service, and outside developers can use the free and open Omlet API to create social mobile apps easily.
From Stanford Report (CA)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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