Twitterize – Anonymize Twitter

Motivation:

Recent events, for instance the Arab spring movement, have proven social media to be a key element. Social media have been and are used to distribute news in the absence of independent news agencies, and to organize protests. However, social media as of today is centralized, making it easy to block, censor, and wiretap. That leaves user exposed, as their confidentiality and in particular anonymity cannot be protected by social media. Add-on privacy enhancing technologies, for instance TOR, suffer the inherent problems of limited availability and poor usability. Thus, new means of communication, which feature both, integrated privacy protection and usability, are required.

Approach:

Twitterize, short for Anonymize Twitter, solves these challenges by using 3 basic principles:

  • Facilitation of mobile device interaction concepts for better usability
  • State of the art encryption for confidentiality
  • TOR-like anonymization through peers

As a result, Twitterize allow confidential and anonymous communication, that follows the well know Twitter paradigm, and building upon the Twitter infrastructure. Twitterize uses our Peer-2-Peers based overlay network for privacy-preserving publish/subscribe to realize private communication for #tags. We use NFC and QR-Codes for quick and usable transfer of all required secrets in order to publish or subscribe to a #tag.

People:

  • Jörg Daubert
  • Dr. Mathias Fischer