Fixbook

INTRODUCTION

These days social media has become an integral part of our lives and consists of all our real-world experiences. It has become a norm to share everything we do to everywhere we go with the whole world using social media. But unknowingly many people sometimes share things which might reveal their personal information like phone numbers and locations. They don’t realize that what they are sharing might come back and bite them in the future. The only thing on their mind while posting a status is the idea of sharing their activities, because of which they don’t make an informed decision about the content. Our solution to this problem is to nudge the user when they are about to post something which might reveal their personal information like location or phone number or email address.  

Another problem that users face is finding posts and comments with undesirable content in their feed. Our solution to this is to hide such posts and comments.

METHODOLOGY

Nudge

We created a chrome extension to solve this problem which works for Facebook.

When the user starts typing a Facebook post the chrome extension issues a REST API server call with the status as the input, then the server processes it and a reply is sent stating whether the post contains any private information like location, phone number or email address. If it does, then the extension shows a nudge to the user telling them what kind of information they are sharing. After this, it's the user’s choice whether to ignore the nudge or edit the post.

Working of REST server

The server gets a string as input and then it uses a regex to check for phone numbers and email addresses in the string. It uses NLTK to check for a location in the string. While checking for the location it checks for the context as well for example ‘Delhi is an awesome place’ won’t fire the nudge but ‘moving to Delhi’ will.

A REST server was used because NLTK does not support Javascript and also so that all the computation is handled by the server and not the host. This would also make the whole process real-time.

 

Hiding Content

It takes a comma-separated list of words from the user that they deem undesirable. Whenever a new comment or post is loaded, using these keywords the extension checks if it contains one of the words if it does then that post or comment is hidden from that user’s timeline.

CONCLUSION

We successfully built a chrome extension with the desired functionalities. On posting a status with personal information, the extension nudged every time. However, we faced a few limitations. Due to the shortcomings of the NLTK library, the extension could not always accurately detect when the user is referring to a location.


THE TEAM

Group 3: [L-R] - Pahal Krishnia, Ishbir Walia, Aayushi Malik, Gargi Gupta, Varnit Jain

VIDEO URL: https://youtu.be/KAEAeLzjIeQ

REFERENCES

1. http://www.django-rest-framework.org/

2. http://www.nltk.org/

3. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted

4. https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html

5. https://firebase.google.com