Clique - privacy enhanced Social Network Site PDFPrintE-mail

Overview

Clique is a modification of the Elgg social networking platform. Clique provides users with a social network platform that enables them to keep control over their privacy. This includes, for example, fine grained access control and configuration of multiple faces (e.g. family, personal, professional) that can be used for interactions with other users. When posting a data item, e.g., name, birthday or profile photo on the site, the user can define for every single other user whether they should be able to see it or not.

Feature list:

  • collections – contacts are organised in collections, roughly corresponding with social circles. USers can form instance define close friends, family, colleagues, former schoolfriends etc as their collections.
  • flexible access control to content – all content contains AC policies based on moving collections and individuals contacts in or out of access, no access boxes
  • visual audience indicators – all content is labeled by icons showing who has access to the information
  • fading relations – depending on the activity of one's contacts, these users slowly disappear. At first this happens through visual indicators (coloured border around user icon), later by closing access to one's data from the automatically defriended contact.

How to Use

Give additional relevant information on how to use the component. E.g., whether the component can be used standalone or requires other components from PrimeLife or external components or has specific infrastructural requirements.

The Clique demonstrator can be accessed through http://clique.primelife.eu

The library comprises only the implementations of the credential system features, additional required components for building many kinds of practical systems are not included in the library. An example for such a component is an access control system that you might want to use in conjunction with the Identity Mixer system.

PrimeLife is building a policy engine which is capable of expressing semantics of anonymous credential systems. A first version based on the PRIME policy engine is already available.

Identity Mixer has been integrated into the PRIME Core as one example use case within a comprehensive privacy-enhancing identity management system. TODO link once page is there

Target Audience

Who may be interested in the component?

The general public, as well as privacy savvy developers.

Future Plans

What are our future plans for the component?

We plan to extend Clique with more features.

Clique is currently in a public evaluation phase. The system is live since January 2010 and experiments and questionnaires will be conducted with actual users of the system. The results of these studies will be used to improve the system and devise new functionality.

In year 2 we would like to incorporate a number of different features for privacy and identity management issues. Here’s a list of them:

  1. Adding dynamic icons to the main page of Clique:
    1. These icons provide general user feedback with regard to the trail of (personal) information a person is leaving behind when using the site
    2. They change as a person alters the settings for access rights e.g., to more stringent
    3. This idea builds on work done in Activity 4 with respect to icons in privacy policies (ULD). Moreover, since it also involves work on privacy metrics we could combine it with writing an article for WP 2.3.
  2. Building pseudonym functionality for participation in groups in Clique:
    1. When the audience of a self-presentation is unknown or unknowable (as is the case when users participate in groups) it is in the users’ interest to create distance between their ‘real’ identities and their persona displayed in the group. In everyday life this practice is known as masking -- think, for instance, of using a pen name to write a book, of stage names for pop idols and of code names for secret agents.
    2. Mimicking the everyday practice of masking we want to build a pseudonym tool for Clique, so that whenever users want to join or create a group they are asked to provide a pseudonym to use for all their postings.
    3. This pseudonym should be invisibly linked to the face(s) behind it, so that the user’s privacy is guaranteed.
  3. Building a fading and blossoming relationships tool in Clique:
    1. In real life relationships between people tend to wax and wane rather than remain exactly the same over time. When people do not see or speak to each other for long periods of time relationships may fade away entirely.
    2. In social network sites all relationships are stable and there is no (visible) difference between contacts that one engages with frequently and ones one doesn’t engage with at all anymore after the moment of adding them to the contact list. We want to remedy this fact by building a tool that mimics fading relationship in Clique, by allowing these to gradually disappear from the contact list. Similarly, blossoming relationships could be made visually more prominent and given more easy access to content and information.
  4. Building a fading content tool for Clique:
    1. One of the key problems with respect to privacy on the internet of the level of permanence of much of the information people place online. Content lives on in cyberspace, oftentimes even long after the owner has forgotten about it, or, even worse, has attempted to remove it.
    2. To contribute to solving this issue we would like to build a fading content tool, which works in a similar way as the one mentioned under 3, except for content.
  5. Integration with and gaining feedback from the Open Source community, so we can return Clique into that community.

Further Information

Platform: Elgg (http://elgg.org), a PHP/MYSQL/Apache based open social networking site platform The basic software Elgg runs on a combination of the Apache web server, MySQL database system and the PHP interpreted scripting language. This is one of the most popular web server environments. Due to Elgg's advanced functionality, there are some extra configuration requirements that are explained in the following.

  • The Apache web server needs to be installed with the following modules:
    • mod_rewrite
    • PHP5
  • MySQL 5+ is needed for data storage PHP 5.2+ needs to be installed as an Apache module
(not in CGI mode or safe mode) with the following libraries:
  • GD (for graphics processing, e.g. user icon rescaling and Captcha)
  • JSON (for API functionality)
  • XML (not installed/compiled by default on all systems)
  • Multibyte String support (for internationalisation)

It is recommended that you increase the memory available to PHP threads beyond the standard 8 or 12MB, and increase the maximum uploaded filesize (which defaults to 2MB). By default, these settings have been set for you in the .htaccess file in the base Elgg directory.

Architecture: Apache, PHP, MySQL.

Download

Documentation: Available at http://clique.primelife.eu

References: PrimeLife D1.2.1, D1.2.2 Ronald Leenes – Context is everything, sociality and privacy in online Social Network Sites, to appear in Simone Fischer-Hübner, Marit Hansen, etc (eds), PrimeLife/IFIP Summerschool 2009.

License: Clique is licensed under GPLv2. The text of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt.

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Last update: March 2010