Online Deception in Social Media

The unknown and the invisible exploit the unwary and the uninformed for illicit financial gain and reputation damage

An Analysis of Tools for Online Anonymity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible explanations for the slow adoption and development of online anonymity technology. The ability to remain anonymous while engaging in different activities, online is increasingly sought after by consumers with privacy concerns. Currently, the only way to maintain online anonymity is through the use of technology. This paper reviews and analyzes the tools currently available to consumers to maintain online anonymity. There are only four tools available to consumers to ensure online anonymity: anonymous remailers, rewebbers, The Onion Router (Tor) and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). These tools provide the protection needed for an Internet user to remain anonymous but suffer from a lack of usability and adoption. Design/methodology/approach The authors have selected a few specific online anonymity technologies based on the following criteria: the technology satisfies our full anonymity definition, the technology is currently available for public use and the technology has been academically researched. Findings Few anonymity technologies are available for public use that offer the ability for full online anonymity, and these technologies are difficult for the average computer user to operate. Further research is still needed to help determine what the average user wants to see in an anonymity technology as well as ways to help users integrate the technology into their commodity software (such as Web browsers). Future online anonymity technologies should enable the user to decide when, how and with whom their information is shared if it is shared at all with ease and simplicity. Originality/value The authors identify, explain and analyze publicly available online anonymity technologies in terms of their usability. The authors identified ways as to how online anonymity technology can be improved to increase public adoption. The authors make pertinent recommendations on how the design and development of online anonymity technology can be improved in the future

Design and performance analysis of a virtual ring architecture for smart grid privacy

The traditional electrical grid has become inadequate in meeting the needs and demands of electricity users in the 21st century. To address this challenge, smart grid technologies have emerged, which promise more efficient production and usage of electricity through bidirectional interactions between the consumer and the utility provider. This two-way interaction allows electricity to be generated in real time based on the actual needs of the consumers. However, this two-way interaction also raises concerns related to the privacy and the personal habits of consumers. To protect sensitive energy usage information of consumers, we propose a virtual ring architecture that can provide a privacy protection solution using symmetric or asymmetric encryptions of customers\u27 requests belonging to the same group. We compare the efficiency of our proposed approach with two recently proposed smart grid privacy approaches namely, one based on blind signature and other based on a homomorphic encryption solution. We show that our approach maintains the privacy of customers while reducing the performance overhead of cryptographic computations by more than a factor of 2 when compared with the aforementioned past solutions. We further demonstrate that our smart grid privacy solution is simple, scalable, cost-effective, and incurs minimal computational processing overheads. © 2013 IEEE

Multiple Account Identity Deception Detection in Social Media Using Nonverbal Behavior

Identity deception has become an increasingly important issue in the social media environment. The case of blocked users initiating new accounts, often called sockpuppetry, is widely known and past efforts, which have attempted to detect such users, have been primarily based on verbal behavior (e.g., using profile data or lexic al features in text). Although these methods yield a high detection accuracy rate, they are computationally inefficient for the social media environment, which often involves databases with large volumes of data. To date, little attention has been paid to detecting online decep- tion using nonverbal behavior. We present a detection method based on nonverbal behavior for identity deception, which can be applied to many types of social media. Using Wikipedia as an experimental case, we demonstrate that our proposed method results in high detection accuracy over previous methods pro- posed while being computationally efficient for the social media environment. We also demonstrate the potential of nonverbal behavior data that exists in social media and how designers and developers can leverage such nonverbal information in detecting deception to safeguard their online communities

An improved privacy solution for the smart grid

Recent advances in hardware, software, computing, and communication technologies have enabled the design and deployment of a smarter, interactive, dynamic 21st cen-tury electrical grid, also known as the smart grid. The bi-directional ow of information between the customer premise and the utility provider opens up several privacy challenges that must beaddressed. We describe possi-ble man-in-the-middle attacks against one (proposed by Marmol et al.) of the recently propsed privacy solu-tions for the smart grid environment. To address this vulnerability, we propose an improved privacy solution. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our so-lution through a detailed security analysis

Design and evaluation of a privacy architecture for crowdsensing applications

By using consumer devices such as cellphones, wearables and Internet of Things devices owned by citizens, crowdsensing systems are providing solutions to the community in areas such as transportation, security, entertainment and the environment through the collection of various types of sensor data. Privacy is a major issue in these systems because the data collected can potentially reveal aspects considered private by the contributors of data. We propose the Privacy-Enabled ARchitecture (PEAR), a layered architecture aimed at protecting privacy in privacy-aware crowdsensing systems. We identify and describe the layers of the architecture. We propose and evaluate the design of MetroTrack, a crowdsensing system that is based on the proposed PEAR architecture

Recent Advances in Wearable Sensing Technologies

Wearable sensing technologies are having a worldwide impact on the creation of novel business opportunities and application services that are benefiting the common citizen. By using these technologies, people have transformed the way they live, interact with each other and their surroundings, their daily routines, and how they monitor their health conditions. We review recent advances in the area of wearable sensing technologies, focusing on aspects such as sensor technologies, communication infrastructures, service infrastructures, security, and privacy. We also review the use of consumer wearables during the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and we discuss open challenges that must be addressed to further improve the efficacy of wearable sensing systems in the future

A Communication Architecture for Crowd Management in Emergency and Disruptive Scenarios

Crowd management aims to develop support infrastructures that can effectively manage crowds at any time. In emergency and disruptive scenarios this concept can minimize the risk to human life and to the infrastructure. We propose the Communication Architecture for Crowd Management (CACROM), which can support crowd management under emergency and disruptive scenarios. We identify, describe, and discuss the various components of the proposed architecture, and we briefly discuss open challenges in the design of crowd management systems for emergency and disruptive scenarios

Vulnerabilities to Online Social Network Identity Deception Detection Research and Recommendations for Mitigation

Identity deception in online social networks is a pervasive problem. Ongoing research is developing methods for identity deception detection. However, the real-world efficacy of these methods is currently unknown because they have been evaluated largely through laboratory experiments. We present a review of representative state-of-the-art results on identity deception detection. Based on this analysis, we identify common methodological weaknesses for these approaches, and we propose recommendations that can increase their effectiveness for when they are applied in real-world environments