Archive for June, 2010

For understanding anonymity, it is quite important to know the terminology of anonymity. Pseudonymity, unlinkability, undetectability and unobservability are the most relevant terms which need to be well understood. Since 2000, Martin Hansen and Prof. Pfitzmann have been working on the terminology document of anonymity and explain all important terms, their relations and differences with examples and known mechanisms to achieve anonymity and the others.  The last version can be downloaded from this link. And the history of the terminology can be followed here.

The document contains also translations of many anonymity-relevant words into different languages. Turkish was missing and I translated that part into Turkish. It can be downloaded from here.

In the following, some definitions from the terminology are cited:
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A privacy case study of Facebook users

After Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, said privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’, Facebook changed its privacy policy and set default privacy settings of most user personal data as “public” without their consent. Facebook has been criticized drastically for this change and was forced to improve its privacy settings. And now Facebook says the new settings are much better and easier.

It is a known fact that people are the weakest link in the security chain. Strong privacy settings should be supported with the wisdom of users. They need to known possible threats and how to protect themselves. Considering Facebook, it is inevitable to keep friends list “secure”. That means one should add a person to his friend list if only he is sure about the identity of this person. This is critical because Facebook’s privacy protection system is mostly based on this distinction.
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