Detecting and resolving privacy conflicts for collaborative data sharing in online social networks

Abstract

We have seen tremendous growth in online social networks (OSNs) in recent years. These OSNs not only offer attractive means for virtual social interactions and information sharing, but also raise a number of security and privacy issues. Although OSNs allow a single user to govern access to her/his data, they currently do not provide any mechanism to enforce privacy concerns over data associated with multiple users, remaining privacy violations largely unresolved and leading to the potential disclosure of information that at least one user intended to keep private. In this paper, we propose an approach to enable collaborative privacy management of shared data in OSNs. In particular, we provide a systematic mechanism to identify and resolve privacy conflicts for collaborative data sharing. Our conflict resolution indicates a tradeoff between privacy protection and data sharing by quantifying privacy risk and sharing loss. We also discuss a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of our approach as part of an application in Facebook and provide system evaluation and usability study of our methodology.

Survey on Access Control for Community-Centered Collaborative Systems

“…Table II: Requirements for access control models and systems tailored to community-centered systems for user errors, security issues, inconsistencies and other security and functional concerns. For instance, in many social network websites like Facebook the user hosting the information in their profile, has full control of the information regardless of the privacy preferences given by the user who posted the information or the user(s) to whom the information refers [Hu et al 2011]. Besides that, existing social network websites offer other capabilities to promote information sharing and community building, possibly introducing additional complications and undesired effects on the protection of users' privacy.…”

Inter-Social-Networking: Accounting for Multiple Identities

“…Methods to detect and resolve privacy conflicts [12], and more generally, to limit and monitor information released online [13] are lacking.…”

“…Importantly, the only point at which these our many email identities must exist together is within those clients in the private context of our personal devices such as mobile phone, tablet and personal computer. 12 …”

Taxonomy for Social Network Data Types from the Viewpoint of Privacy and User Control

“…This may include data elements that the user has initially shared with the contact or provided to him using other communication channels. In the first case, which is also discussed in [18], the OSN may prevent the contact from publishing the item with a larger than the user's intended audience and grant additional permissions to the user. However in the second case, the contact remains the only person to control the visibility of the data element, raising serious privacy implications.…”

“…Works in assessing the access control models in OSNs (e.g. [16], [17]) do not differentiate between different attributes of the user identity while others only focus on singular aspects such as the owner and creator of items [18]. Still, it is seldom, or only briefly [19] considered that attribute implementations on OSNs vary widely in implementation, semantics, applicable policies [20] and privacy controls [21] and thus carry far-reaching implications for the user.…”