A Survey on Privacy Approaches for Social Networks

The popular use of Social Networks (SNs) for online messaging and information exchange provided available online massive amount of personal data. In general, social interactions require information sharing between involved parties, which implies knowing with whom, and to which extent the information is shared. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of SNs state-of-the-art by exploring users’ privacy in SNs implementations from centralized to fully decentralized architecture. To clarify whether existing techniques can help to prevent attacks or not, we survey and compare how privacy policies are specified and operationalized into the SN design. The result of our in-depth analysis suggests that currently privacy enforcement mechanisms are not satisfactory in SNs because they produce unbalanced control of the shared information.