To Add or Not to Add: Privacy and Social Honeypots

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a mainstream cultural phenomenon in the past years, where million of people connect to each other and share memories, digital media and business relations. Many users also publish personal information about their activities, relationships, locations and interests on these sites, seemingly unaware of how these data can be used by other parties. Sites typically attempt to restrict data-sharing to members of a user''s social network, but this is only effective if these social networks cannot be exploited by malicious users. In this paper we perform an experiment in order to assess the vulnerability and privacy awareness of users when engaging in online relations with random unknown users, or those pretending to be a famous character. We find that usually users do not accept random friendship requests, but some aggressively search for celebrities, making a perfect case for spammers to form honeypots using such fake profiles. We present a set of suggestions for enhancing privacy on social networks which could reduce the threats of identity theft in such environments.