This paper presents a new personal data access control (PDAC) scheme that is inspired by the protection schemes practiced in communities for sharing valuable commodities. The PDAC users are assumed to be members of an online social network such as facebook.com. The PDAC computes a "trusted distance" measure between users that is partly based on hop distance on the social network and an affine distance derived from experiential data. Based on the trusted distance, the social network is divided into three zones: accept, attest, and deny. Requests from users in the accept zone (closest to the data origin) are accepted unconditionally while the requests from the deny zone (furthest from the data origin) are rejected outright. Requests from the attest zone need additional authorization to get access. In addition to protecting first accesses, PDAC tracks reposts to minimize data leaks (i.e., spread of data beyond the limits set by the data originator). The details of the PDAC sche...