RelationGram: Tie-Strength Visualization for User-Controlled Online Identity Authentication

We consider the specific problem of how users can securely authenticate online identities (e.g., associate a Facebook ID with its owner). Based on prior social science research demonstrating that the social tie strength is a useful indicator of trust in many real-world relationships, we explore how tie strength can be visualized using well-defined and measurable parameters. We then apply the visualization in the context of online friend invitations and propose a protocol for secure online identity authentication. We also present an implementation on a popular online social network (i.e., Facebook). We find that tie strength visualization is a useful primitive for online identity authentication.