Offline Social Networks: Stepping Away from the Internet (Position Paper) Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer
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Offline Social Networks: stepping away from the Internet (Position paper) Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer To cite this version: Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer. Offline Social Networks: stepping away from the Internet (Position paper). 2012. hal-00680680 HAL Id: hal-00680680 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00680680 Preprint submitted on 19 Mar 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Offline Social Networks: stepping away from the Internet (Position paper) Anne-Marie Kermarrec Erwan Le Merrer INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique [email protected] [email protected] Abstract the Internet. Facebook counts today more than 800 million users. Every single event is instantaneously Online social networks have been revolutionary in Twitted though thousands of different paths. Yet, the way people interact over the Internet today. it is hard to believe that online social networks Typically in online social networks the information match everyone needs and all situations. In addi- is ephemeral while the relationships between users tion the popularity of current social networks is not are sustainable. While they have been very suc- without having an impact on their functionality. cessful, they usually do not leverage the notion of First of all, a key notion in an online social network physical proximity. In addition the sustainable na- is the fact that relationships are sustainable while ture of the connections does not leave any room for the information delivered through posts is clearly sporadic and fleeting social relations. In this posi- ephemeral. This represents an issue since giving up tion paper, we explore the concept of offline so- a connection on an online social network represents cial network considering geographical locality as a negative statement about people. Yet, it might a first-class citizen. Offline social networks do not just reflect the fact that although you enjoyed talk- aim at capturing long-standing relationships and in ing again to your old primary school buddy, it did that sense are very complementary to online ones. not take long to realize that you might not want Being implemented off the Internet, they avoid pri- to be permanently connected to him. Similarly, in- vacy breaches that users start to complain about. formation posted a long time ago is almost impos- An offline social network relies on a hardware de- sible to dig out, several scenarios can be thought vice, plugged in some location, to which anyone can of where a permanent access to information can freely connect. In an offline social network, while be desirable. Finally, privacy is a recurrent issue the relationships between users are ephemeral, the in OSNs. While the mere presence of a 800 mil- information can be temporary or permanent de- lion user network does not seem to convey any fear pending on the application scenarios. We believe from the Internet users, users might be more and that such a concept matches a wide spectrum of more reluctant to give away so much information usages today that are not covered by online social about themselves1. In addition, while some knobs networks. In this position paper, we describe the are available to adjust the privacy settings, there is concept, the potential applications, the underlying anecdotal evidence that nobody bothers changing technologies as well as the associated exciting re- the parameters for every post. While this might search agenda. not be perceived as a drawback, and is indeed a clear asset in many situations, the wired and global nature of online social networks, together with the 1 Introduction huge information overload they are under, does not ease the leveraging of physical locality. Other secu- Online Social Networks (OSN) have conquered the digital world over the past five years and literally 1The value of Facebook is mostly due to the enormous revolutionized the interactions between people over amount of personal data that the company holds. 1 rity and privacy concerns for online social networks called pocket-switched networks, do not rely specif- include information leak, user de-anonymization, ically on the Internet to operate. Yet, they focus on phishing and spamming [7]. leveraging the mobility patterns of users to carry Interestingly enough, physical proximity is not (route) information [11]. One of the closest ap- without having a clear impact on social networks proach is the PirateBox [6], which is designed to and this is conveyed by the growing number of provide a totally mobile box for file-sharing, there- Foursquares users. Yet, introducing the physical fore running on battery. We seek to offer an en- locality in current social networks (Foursquare is hanced service by providing additional social com- integrated to Twitter or Facebook) has not yet en- munication and interaction tools, possibly over a tirely fulfill its promises and there is hardly any short to medium time span. Finally, another inter- new functionality emerging from it. In this paper, esting work [5] aims at providing friend recommen- we propose a novel and orthogonal way to imple- dations, as well as acquaintance information, for ment a social network, entirely stepping away for people located nearby in an office, through work- the Internet. We present here the Offline Social place resources. We discuss in this paper the oppor- Network (OffSN). An OffSN is simply a hardware tunity and the benefits of exploring such proximity- device which acts as a rendez-vous point between related interactions. various users located in the area of reach of that The goal of this position paper is to introduce device, who can potentially form a social network, the concept of Offline Social Network, to discuss exchange data, store their own data, use the local some possible application scenarios and to expose data stored, while potentially enjoying all the stan- the research challenges associated to OffSNs. We dard functionalities of OSN, such as chat, walls, etc. do not aim at that stage at providing a complete The fact that there is no connection to the Internet solution but rather to convince the community that and that the accesses to that box are anonymous this novel concept can be of great interest both from by default (depending on the users and the param- the users and researchers standpoints. The rest of eters), the users privacy is preserved (provided the the paper is organized as follow: we first present box is trusted). The users may interact through some application scenarios of OffSNs in Section 2, the OffSN and create an ephemeral social network, we then present the technical details of the pro- reflecting the fact that they are at the same loca- posed solution in Section 3 before setting up the tion at the same time while not implying any long- research agenda ahead in Section 4. standing digital relationships in the future. The information stored on the OffSN can be temporary as a guarantee that the data durability is limited 2 Application scenarios over time and that no user can be traced. It can also be permanent for instance when associated to In this section, we introduce a number of potential a specific location. applications for offline social networks, that would Recent approaches such as Vanish [8] have made be difficult to cover with traditional online social the case for time limited data durability (as e.g. networks. emails or wall messages), proposing a solution for self-destructing data. The rationale is that some 2.1 Local information sharing interactions between users, made possible by the use of electronic resources, have an acceptable life- Online social networks represent a great way to time and are not meant to be accessible by possibly share information, but the very temporary nature third parties ad vitam aeternam. There has been of the information in OSNs is such that if should some notion of location-aware or context-aware so- someone want to share some data on the long term, cial networks such as Lovegety (a social network he/she has to place it on his/her account and pe- for dating services based in Japan) or office-based riodically generates notifications targeting the new networks. Yet those approaches rely on a connec- comers. Additionally, when data is meant to be tion to the Internet to manage the relationships shared among geographically close people, in reach while exploiting the physical proximity to enhance of a local area network for instance, there is no rea- the user experience. Opportunistic networks, also son nor need for that data to first be uploaded to 2 the Internet (at the often low WAN bandwidth), to ing application of an offline social network in such be then downloaded again locally. This would rely a setting could be to share information both ways. on the Internet infrastructure while the LAN in- Consider a band, having a concert where fans would frastructure is perfectly adapted and sufficient here. pay for the concert and in return would get some Yet such situations happen all the time. of the music tracks for free. The Offline social net- work could be used to download the music tracks without requiring an online password/verification Promoting local content Consider a location procedure. The rationale is very simple: if you to which context-aware information is associated are in the room attending to the concert, you get (for instance an art gallery located in some city).