Privacy issues in social networks and analysis: a comprehensive survey

Abstract

Social networks have become part of today's life; however, they also create numerous privacy problems for their users as they reveal sensitive information. Thus, the privacy preservation has become a big problem in social networks and there are several researches related to this topic. However, the current research achievements for this issue are only ad hoc solutions and the broad picture of the problem is not clear. This paper surveys a wide range of related researches and realises that the topic includes many sub-areas; for example, the privacy in publishing social network data for the use of third-party consumers or the privacy of users in the leakage of individuals' information to unexpected people in their social circle. The study also analyses the advantages as well as limitations of proposed solutions. On the basis of that the research outlines key outstanding issues and recommends directions for the future research. Moreover, the research also investigates common privacy metrics and popular privacy-preserving techniques to provide readers some basic tools to resolve open problems in the topic. The ultimate purpose of this research is to pave a solid background for people, who are interested in the topic, to do research further.

Attribute susceptibility and entropy based data anonymization to improve users community privacy and utility in publishing data

“…Protecting the privacy of the individual user and his/her community, and enhancing the anonymous data utility is a longstanding challenge in SN users' data publishing [35]. According to the Pham et al [36] there are three major privacy areas in SN that are shown in Fig. 1.…”

Moving to the Edge-Cloud-of-Things: Recent Advances and Future Research Directions

“…Nevertheless, the share of part or full personal information [105,106], such as credit card numbers, could be stolen and used in illegal activities. That leads us to ask how edge computing could protect sensitive information, which imposes serious considerations related to the data security of citizens?…”

A Novel Graph-modification Technique for User Privacy-preserving on Social Networks

“…Since the risk has a devastating impact on the daily life of the people involved (for example, disclosure of sensitive data, such as e-mails, instant messages, or private relationships), protecting user privacy has become an important and challenging problem in online social networks. Anonymization of the social network structure [1], [2] is a common approach to protecting user privacy. A social network may be modeled as a graph, where vertices represent individuals, organizations or users, and edges represent connections, relationships between users or information flows [3].…”