Section: Scientific Foundations

Online Social Networks

Social Networks have rapidly become a fundamental component of today's distributed applications. Web 2.0 applications have dramatically changed the way users interact with the Internet and with each other. The number of users of websites like Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, or MySpace is constantly growing, leading to significant technical challenges. On the one hand, these websites are called to handle enormous amounts of data. On the other hand, news continue to report the emergence of privacy threats to the personal data of social-network users. Our research aims to exploit our expertise in distributed systems to lead to a new generation of scalable, privacy-preserving, social applications.