Misra, Gaurav and Such, Jose M. and Gill, Lauren (2017) A Privacy Assessment of Social Media Aggregators. In: ASONAM '17 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 :. ACM, New York, pp. 561-568. ISBN 9781450349932
Abstract
Social Media Aggregator (SMA) applications present a platform enabling users to manage multiple Social Networking Sites (SNS) in one convenient application, which results in a unique concentration of data from several SNS accounts in addition to the user’s mobile phone data available to them. In this paper, we provide a detailed privacy assessment of 13 popular SMAs from 3 app stores by using a three-step methodology by inspecting the mobile data and social media data accessed by these applications, checking for privacy policies and their compliance with distributors’ vetting policies and performing a qualitative assessment of traceability between privacy policies and the actual transparency and control mechanisms offered to users by the apps’ interfaces. Our results demonstrate a variation in data accessed by the individual applications, an absence of privacy policies for 5 of the SMAs evaluated, and a lack of traceability between privacy policies and transparency and control of interface operations.