Privacy, cost, and availability tradeoffs in decentralized OSNs

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become enormously popular. However, two aspects of many current OSNs have important implications with regards to privacy: their centralized nature and their acquisition of rights to users' data. Recent work has proposed decentralized OSNs as more privacy-preserving alternatives to the prevailing OSN model. We present three schemes for decentralized OSNs. In all three, each user stores his own personal data in his own machine, which we term a Virtual Individual Server (VIS). VISs self-organize into peer-to-peer overlay networks, one overlay per social group with which the VIS owner wishes to share information. The schemes differ in where VISs and data reside: (a) on a virtualized utility computing infrastructure in the cloud, (b) on desktop machines augmented with socially-informed data replication, and (c) on desktop machines during normal operation, with failover to a standby virtual machine in the cloud when the primary VIS becomes unavailable. We focus on tradeoffs between these schemes in the areas of privacy, cost, and availability.