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A Privacy Assessment of Social Media Aggregators

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNConference contribution/Paperpeer-review

Published
Publication date3/08/2017
Host publicationASONAM '17 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM
Pages561-568
Number of pages8
ISBN (print)9781450349932
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Social Media Aggregator (SMA) applications present a platform enabling users to manage multiple Social Networking Sites (SNS) in one convenient application, which results in a unique concentration of data from several SNS accounts in addition to the user’s mobile phone data available to them. In this paper, we provide a detailed privacy assessment of 13 popular
SMAs from 3 app stores by using a three-step methodology by inspecting the mobile data and social media data accessed by these applications, checking for privacy policies and their
compliance with distributors’ vetting policies and performing a qualitative assessment of traceability between privacy policies and the actual transparency and control mechanisms offered
to users by the apps’ interfaces. Our results demonstrate a variation in data accessed by the individual applications, an absence of privacy policies for 5 of the SMAs evaluated, and a
lack of traceability between privacy policies and transparency and control of interface operations.