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Social Privacy Protector - Protecting Users' Privacy in Social Networks

Authors:
Michael Fire
Dima Kagan
Aviad Elishar,
Yuval Elovici

Keywords: Keywords-Social Network Analysis; Social Network Privacy; Social Network Security; Facebook Application; Fake Profiles.

Abstract:
In recent years, online social networks have grown exponentially, as these networks are fantastic places to meet and network with people who share similar personal interests. Facebook, currently the largest social network, has more than 901 million active users. The amount of personal information each user exposes on social networks like Facebook is staggering. Recent research in the area of social networking evaluated that many Facebook users exposed personal information. Due to the many security concerns regarding online personal exposure, we developed the Social Privacy Protector, a software which aims to improve the security and privacy of Facebook users. The software contains three protection layers which improve user privacy by implementing different methods. The software first identifies a user's friends who might pose a threat, and then restricts this ``friend"'s exposure to the user's personal information. The second layer is an expansion of Facebook's basic privacy settings based on different types of social network usage profiles. The third layer alerts the user about the number of installed applications on their Facebook profile which have access to their private information. An initial version of the Social Privacy Protection software was evaluated on 74 Facebook users and successfully assisted them in restricting the access of 392 friends.

Pages: 46 to 50

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: October 21, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-228-8

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from October 21, 2012 to October 26, 2012