Abstract

Social Networking Applications has gained tremendous response from all the sections of people across the entire world from last few years. Social networking has crossed all the boundaries and glued whole world population together. Users of OSN (Online Social Networking) sites can re-connect with school friends, find some activity or even life partners, and make new friends. OSN has also revolutionized the business community. Now the companies leverage OSN’s credibility and build their reputation, get invaluable information about the customers. The companies are also using OSN for the advertising and the recruitment processes. However, posting of user information on OSN poses greater threats/risks as identity theft, online stalking, and information leakage. The volume and accessibility of personal information available on social networking sites have attracted malicious people who seek to exploit this information. This imposes greater threat to the users’ privacy and security. In this article many security and privacy challenges currently faced by OSN applications are mentioned. The distributed OSN architecture with an external control module is proposed and a prototype is also presented which overcomes many of the privacy, security, accessibility and identity challenges in different perspectives faced by current OSN applications.

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