Written by:
Gautam K Sawhney

NYU Students Creating Privacy-Controlled Social Net

With the hundreds of users logging-in and sharing data, it is no shock that Facebook is trying to take full advantage of the aggregated data Facebook users create daily. Consequently, Facebook has been making questionable privacy modifications to its user policy such as, using personal information to target advertisements. A lot of daily users overlook the privacy changes and are not aware of how public their personal information may be to recruiters, employers, and companies.

However, a young group of inspirational and entrepreneurial students have embarked on a path to help further protect user data and personal information. The NYU students are going to create a social networking website called Disapora. The open source social networking website aggregates user’s data from websites such as, Twitter and Facebook. The goal of the networking website is to make the website easily programmable, making it easier and simple to integrate data from select websites to Disapora. The website will be bi-directional. Once logging into Dispora, one can see feeds such as, uploaded Flickr Pictures and Facebook news feeds. Simultaneously, if one uploads a picture to Flickr through Dispora then it will also create a Tweet which contains a link and a caption to the caption.

Interestingly the website will be more secure than connecting through direct websites like Facebook or Twitter. This is because once you friend someone through Dispora, one becomes connected through a direct and secure connection rather than a “superfluous hub.” Dispora announced their idea on April 24th and since then the company has raised more than $23,000. Photo courtesy of Flickr.