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finalisation expose

Carsten Porth 5 years ago
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75c8886e96

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expose/Expose - Masterthesis - Carsten Porth - Draft v1.pdf


BIN
expose/Expose - Masterthesis - Carsten Porth.pdf


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expose/Expose - Masterthesis - Carsten Porth.tex

@@ -57,12 +57,18 @@ This work will examine what such a solution might look like and what difficultie
 
 
 \section{Related Work/Background}
-The criticism on how personal data is handled by the large online social networks like Twitter and Facebook is not new. Therefore, there have been some attempts to build networks that focus on privacy. Unfortunately, these attempts were unsuccessful and did not reach critical mass to exist permanently. And although criticism continues and scandals have become public again and again, the majority of users remained loyal to large networks. As a consequence of this circumstance, the protection of personal data with further use of the corresponding networks with all their functions is an interesting topic. One way to better protect privacy is to use a hybrid client app. This hybrid app allows the user to use the network with all its features in a conventional way. But beyond that, it allows the user to share data with other users who are not saved on the servers of the network operator. For this a peer 2 peer network is used and the data is stored decentrally.
+The criticism on how personal data is handled by the large online social networks like Twitter and Facebook is not new. Therefore, there have been some attempts to build networks that focus on privacy. Safebook, for example, remained purely academic and Open-Book tried to collect 100,000 € via kickstarter and received only 45,000 €. Unfortunately, these attempts were unsuccessful and did not reach critical mass to exist permanently. And although criticism continues and scandals have become public again and again, the majority of users remained loyal to large networks. As a consequence of this circumstance, the protection of personal data with further use of the corresponding networks with all their functions is an interesting topic. One way to better protect privacy is to use a hybrid client app. This hybrid app allows the user to use the network with all its features in a conventional way. But beyond that, it allows the user to share data with other users who are not saved on the servers of the network operator. For this a peer 2 peer network is used and the data is stored decentrally.
 
 \subsection{Hybrid Online Social Network App}
 The idea behind a hybrid online social network app is that the user can continue to use the network without compromise, with all his contacts and full functionality. Furthermore, it is still possible for other users to communicate in a conventional manner with the users of the app. However, in addition to the data exchange via the server of the provider, there is also the possibility of exchanging data via a peer 2 peer network. The data exchange in this way should be displayed in the app automatically in the right places. In this case users must use the app.
 
-To implement such an app, some requirements must be met. First, the social network used must provide interfaces that allow it to legally retrieve data. It is common that such APIs can be used via REST interfaces. Furthermore, a way has to be found how data can be exchanged over a peer 2 peer network. In general, the installation and operation of a separate client is necessary to use the network. Since this is data worthy of protection, it is also important to deal with the issue of encryption.
+
+To implement such an app, some requirements must be met:
+\begin{itemize}
+    \item First, the social network used must provide interfaces that allow it to legally retrieve data. It is common that such APIs can be used via REST interfaces.
+    \item A peer 2 peer network is needed to connect the users among each other and exchange data between them. Communication with the network via an interface needs to be implemented.
+    \item Personal data needs to be protected. Therefore it's important to ensure the data is encrypted and can only be read by authorized people.
+\end{itemize}
 
 \subsection{Facebook}
 In March 2018, it was revealed that the data of 87 million Facebook users was harvested by another company running an app on Facebook. The British company Cambridge Analytica had collected data via an app on Facebook and processed it for their own use. Both companies suffered immense damage after it became known. Facebook suffered a major damage to its image, Cambridge Analytica had to file for bankruptcy and ceased operations.
@@ -84,13 +90,12 @@ Besides Facebook, also Twitter was in press in April 2018 because of selling use
 In difference to Facebook, Twitter offers an API for developers covering nearly the whole functionality of Twitter. Therefore, it is easily possible to develop own Twitter clients. Unfortunately, over the years Twitter also made restrictions to the API and it is likely that this process will continue. But right now, these restrictions are not affecting the goals of the thesis. So all in all, Twitter is a good candidate to develop a hybrid client for.
 
 \section{Approach/Goal}
-The goal of the thesis is the development of a Twitter client app for Android. In this app it should be possible to use the traditional functions of Twitter as usual, so that communication with any other Twitter user is possible without problems. In addition, the user should also be possible to decide whether a tweet or like is shared with the followers via a peer-2-peer network and is therefore not stored on a Twitter server.
+Main goal for this thesis is to develop a concept for a hybrid client app for an online social network. To this, requirements for the social network and the peer 2 peer network and their interfaces need to be investigated. The results should be validated with a prototype. Regarding the prototype, Twitter should be used as social network and due to the limited time the following functionality should be implemented:
 
-Due to the limited time the app should have the following functionalities:
 \begin{itemize}
 	\item Fetch the users home feed containing tweets from the Twitter server and related tweets from the P2P network.
 	\item Display user profiles and user feeds again containing both types of tweets.
-	\item Write tweets in text form and decide on which network they are stored. Same for liking and retweeting.
+	\item Write tweets in text form and \textbf{decide on which network they are stored}. Same for liking and retweeting.
 	\item Search public Twitter for users and tweets for a given keyword.
 	\item Configuration of the key pair for encryption and decryption.
 \end{itemize}
@@ -103,6 +108,7 @@ As a result, the following Twitter functionalities are not implemented in the co
 	\item Writing tweets containing any multimedia attachment like videos and pictures
 \end{itemize}
 
+\noindent
 The tweets exchanged via the peer 2 peer network are serialized into a JSON or XML format and then exchanged among the clients via the P2P network.