| Hey HNers, Social networks have proved that people can and will communicate online, sharing bits of their lives with their friends. Facebook with its millions of users is the modern and most successful example! I would like to propose a possible improvement of the privacy-related issues that arise from the central design of such networks: Use something along the lines of public key (PK) cryptography to hide the messages exchanged by users. Friends would somehow exchange public keys and a Javascript client would automatically encrypt/decrypt messages that are stored in the network. For example: a status update would be a long string containing instances of the actual "status message", each encrypted with the (public) key of the friend that is allowed to see it. The client at the friend's side, will decrypt the instance (and discard the rest, non-decryptable string) and show it as normal status update message. That would create a sub-network, and yes, loosing the private key will be a very bad event! Anyway, what do you think? |