Social networking Web sites enable individuals with common interests or backgrounds to connect and communicate online. Upon joining a social networking service, users can create personal profiles, create links to other members, and contact each other. Self-managed administrative settings provide users with a limited degree of control over who is able to view their profile information and contact them.

The explosion in the size and number of online social networking has given rise to privacy concerns, security risks, and user convenience issues. The main user convenience issues are the inability to conveniently share profile and reputation data across networks and having to manage a different password for each site. Various “lightweight identity” initiatives are currently attempting to address these convenience issues, but they raise new privacy concerns and make users even less secure.

The U-Prove™ technology has been designed to holistically address privacy, security, and user convenience issues in online social networking:

• Login convenience: Increasingly, members of social networks are subscribed to multiple social networks. Our technology enables a seamless single sign-on experience by giving users multiple electronic access tokens that can be protected with a single password. These tokens also provide much greater security, in that they prevent man-in-the-middle phishing attacks.
• Strong anonymous or pseudonymous identities: Predators can easily cloak their identities online to scam target members or arrange for physical assault. Our technology enables a site to issue access tokens that enable registered individuals to strongly authenticate without being identifiable. In addition, the site can control how many personas a subscriber can have and can ban members who abuse their privileges at access time.
• Minimal disclosure proofs: Our technology enables members of social networks to selectively disclose profile and reputation information. Anyone can vouch for profile and reputation data of members by digitally certifying that data; certified data cannot be modified but can be selectively disclosed while retaining anonymity or pseudonymity.
• Cross-network data transfer: Our technology enables users to port their own profile and reputation information across networking sites, in a manner that enables target recipients to verify the integrity and source authenticity of this information. At the same time, users who port their profile and reputation information can do so selectively and can eliminate any unwanted profiling powers across social networks.