Users Of MIT Network Can Restrict Their Location To Friends OnlyUsers Of MIT Network Can Restrict Their Location To Friends Only

MIT has introduced a social networking system that lets you and your chosen friends and colleagues wirelessly reveal your locations to each other while protecting your identity and location from everybody else.

The system is called iFIND and the university rolled it out Wednesday to its 20,000-member community. The system's creators speculate it could represent a pilot program for the protection of data, because the system's intelligence is located inside the client application and not on central servers.

"Our goal was to create a tool that would allow friends to keep track of friends and increase serendipitous connections," said Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory. "The system is device-centric, not network-centric. Nobody can track your position unless you want them to, and you decide how to exchange information with the outside world."

Primarily because the system doesn't collect users' data, iFIND lets individuals keep control, Ratti said. User data is encrypted at the laptop level, which gives the system tight security. All data is sent over encrypted peer-to-peer links; the system does not utilize centralized storage.

The system piggybacks on MIT's dense network of 3,000 Wi-Fi access points that cover its 168-acre campus in Cambridge, Mass. Laptop users moving about the campus can visually identify the locations of the "friends" they have authorized to share iFIND with. The locations of "friends" are marked by symbols on a grid that appears on users' screens.

"Imagine coming out of a class in a faraway corner of the MIT campus instantly knowing which friends are nearby," said Ratti.

Ratti believes the system could have far-reaching implications for the security of social networking sites in particular and for network security in general. Colleagues and friends could meet and work and socialize on networks utilizing the iFIND approach without exposing personal and business information.

Future applications, according to MIT officials, could let users select business "friends" and share data with, for instance, police departments to let them find users in an emergency.

Support for the iFIND platform was provided by MIT's Information Services and Technology unit and by the university's Wi-Fi initiative.