Mr. Privacy: Open and Federated Social Networking Using Email

Do you think social networking should always be closed? We don’t. That’s why we have created an open and federated social networking platform that is bootstrapped from email. We call this system Mr. Privacy. Applications built on Mr. Privacy are “social apps” that look nothing like email. Email is used only as a transport and personal database. We choose email because it is more pervasive than any social network; it is an open and federated platform that lets consumers choose their providers or hosting their own. Mr. Privacy provides an API to developers to build distributed social applications with significantly less effort and provides consumer with privacy–automatically. We have developed a prototype Mr. Privacy platform for the Android, iOS, and the Firefox browser for PCs. On top of Mr. Privacy, we created three applications to share GPS locations, playlists, as well as our browsing experience. Preliminary results suggest that the email protocols suffice for building these kinds of social applications. Overall, not only does this model better support data privacy and ownership, its openness facilitates competition that will lead to further innovation in the fast growing social software arena.