Enabling Private Conversations on Twitter

User privacy has been an increasingly growing concern in online social networks (OSNs). While most OSNs today provide some form of privacy controls so that their users can protect their shared content from other users, these controls are typically not sufficiently expressive and/or do not provide fine-grained protection of information. In this paper, we consider the introduction of a new privacy control—group messaging on Twitter, with users having fine- grained control over who can see their messages. Specifically, we demonstrate that such a privacy control can be offered to users of Twitter today without having to wait for Twitter to make changes to its system. We do so by designing and implementing PrivTweet,
a wrapper around Twitter that enables private group communication among existing Twitter users while preserving Twitter’s commercial interests. Our design preserves the privacy of group information (i.e., who communicates with whom) both from the PrivTweet server as well as from undesired PrivTweet users. Furthermore, our evaluation shows that our implementation of PrivTweet imposes minimal server-side bandwidth requirements and incurs low client-side energy consumption. Our PrivTweet client for Android- based devices has been downloaded by over 1000 users and its utility has been noted by several media articles.

Author(s):

Indrajeet Singh    
University of California Riverside
United States

Michael Butkiewicz    
University of California Riverside
United States

Harsha Madhyastha    
University of California Riverside
United States

Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy    
University of California Riverside
United States

Sateesh Addepalli    
Cisco Systems
United States