Generation Innovation Internship at the Institute of Computer Science, Innsbruck

The research group Quality Engineering (QE) supervised five scholars during the 4 weeks long Generation Innovation Internship.

"I know what you did yesterday!" using this motto - the young researchers examined in July/August 2010 the risks of social networks. Aim of this internship was to sensibilize adolescents to the issues of data protection in social networks and to also show them the diversity of research areas in the domain of Computer Science.
In the first two weeks of the internship, the students received an introduction to programming - here they learnt the basics of encryption and secure E-mailing.

In the third and fourth week the main focus was on data protection in social networks. The interns autonomously researched and evaluated the five most popular social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Netlog, Twitter and Wer-kennt-wen regarding specific data protection criteria.The evaluation criteria were: passing on of personal data, spam, standard data protection setup, data security and the possibility to delete profiles. They also examined which incidences happened in the past due to a lack of data protection. This includes theft of identity and cyber mobbing. At the end of the internship the interns gave a presentation on 6. August 2010 where they demonstrated the results of their research and they showed that they are now experts when it comes to social networks