Open Standards for Unified and Secure Data Privacy Policies in context of Trusted Social Networking

Social Networking sites(SNS) like Facebook and Google provide Free services to their users! They leverage on external revenue generating mechanisms. They even resort to ‘leasing’ out user generated data to third party entities such as data mining, data analytics companies etc. “So What?” - there is a chance that the data analysts or advertisers misuse user data (especially personally identifiable information) adversely. Each company creates their own privacy & data sharing policy which is subject to interpretation by their legacl teams. There is need to find workable solutions in order to ensure that there is no scope for misuse or privacy breach by companies. Privacy policies and legislations play a vital role in protection of data security and privacy of user’s digital identity from being compromised. A holistic and technically sound policy is very important to set the expectations and regulations for service providers & law enforcement agencies in order to uphold the rights of users around the world. We believe that a unified secure data privacy policy for data sharing that are geo agnostic is a necessity for social networking. We propose Open Standards for such technically correct policies that include Certifying Agencies that audit the service providers in real time. These policies needs to be revised on periodic basis by including all relevant stake holders; and needs to be enforced on social networking service providers in order to move towards Trusted Social Networking.