Preserving Privacy as Social Responsibility in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Online social networks provide an environment for their users to share content with others, where the user who shares a content item is put in charge, generally ignoring others that might be affected by it. However, a content that is shared by one user can very well violate the privacy of other users. To remedy this, ideally, all users who are related to a content should get a say in how the content should be shared. Recent approaches advocate the use of agreement technologies to enable stakeholders of a post to discuss the privacy configurations of a post. This allows related individuals to express concerns so that various privacy violations are avoided up front. Existing techniques try to establish an agreement on a single post. However, most of the time, agreement should be established over multiple posts such that the user can tolerate slight breaches of privacy in return of a right to share posts themselves in future interactions. As a result, users can help each other preserve their privacy, viewing this as their social responsibility. This article develops a reciprocity-based negotiation for reaching privacy agreements among users and introduces a negotiation architecture that combines semantic privacy rules with utility functions. We evaluate our approach over multiagent simulations with software agents that mimic users based on a user study.

Social Media and Social Awareness

“…Addressing the user-user privacy issue requires collaboration among scientists from different disciplines, including computer scientists, GIScientists, and psychologists. For example, Kekulluoglu et al (2017) studied a hybrid negotiation architecture with a reciprocity mechanism to mimic the social responsibility in reality, and a credit system was used to encourage agents/users to respect other's privacy in social media.…”

Analysing Privacy Leakage of Life Events on Twitter

“…However, most OSN providers do not allow tagged users to remove/modify the post giving them limited control over their privacy. There are some early proof-of-concept research to solve these collaborative privacy situations automatically [16,21,22], but they have yet to be adopted by any OSN providers. Some users take drastic measures and deactivate/delete their accounts to protect themselves from this type of tagging [6].…”

Assisting humans in privacy management: an agent-based approach

“…Another set of approaches consider how entities can resolve privacy conflicts among themselves. They employ techniques like collaborative access policy administration [9,25], argumentation [32], negotiations [29,54], help of a mediator [52], secret key sharing [28] and so on. We review some of these work in comparison to pelte here.…”

“…As part of the auction mechanism, pelte can be used to assign bids to images automatically according to privacy value of the image. Similarly, Such and Rovatsos [54] and Keküllüoğlu et al [29] propose negotiation mechanisms for conflicts in OSNs that support ReBAC. pelte would be able to act on behalf of users to provide input to the negotiation mechanisms in case user preferences are requested.…”