All Friends Are Not Created Equal: An Interaction Intensity Based Approach to Privacy in Online Social Networks

Recent research identifies a growing privacy problem that exists within Online Social Networks (OSNs). Several studies have shown how easily strangers can extract personal data about users from the network. Other studies have shown that an extremely small percentage of OSN users change their permissive default privacy settings. Complementary systems have been proposed to provide privacy for OSN users but many of them seem to be costly in terms of simplicity or management overhead. Furthermore, several of these approaches seem to violate the social aspect of online social networks by reducing the problem to manual access management with cryptography. Under this setting, instead of freely sharing one’s data with its friends, a user will share data only with those friends possessing allowed cryptographic keys. While these systems will indeed provide additional privacy for user data, they will not address a more fundamental problem that exists within OSNs: the inability of the network ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Lerone Banks, Shyhtsun Felix Wu
• Keywords: Computer Science And Engineering, CSE 2009, Online Social Networks, Privacy, Social Network