Privacy and security for online social networks: challenges and opportunities

Online social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have experienced exponential growth in recent years. These OSNs offer attractive means of online social interactions and communications, but also raise privacy and security concerns. In this article we discuss the design issues for the security and privacy of OSNs. We find there are inherent design conflicts between these and the traditional design goals of OSNs such as usability and sociability. We present the unique security and privacy design challenges brought by the core functionalities of OSNs and highlight some opportunities of utilizing social network theory to mitigate these design conflicts.

[1]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Information revelation and privacy in online social networks , 2005, WPES '05.

[2]  Susan B. Barnes,et al.  A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States , 2006, First Monday.

[3]  Cynthia Dwork,et al.  Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography , 2007, WWW '07.

[4]  Lise Getoor,et al.  Preserving the Privacy of Sensitive Relationships in Graph Data , 2007, PinKDD.

[5]  Scott A. Golder,et al.  Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks. , 2007 .

[6]  Siddharth Srivastava,et al.  Anonymizing Social Networks , 2007 .

[7]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Characterizing privacy in online social networks , 2008, WOSN '08.

[8]  Phillip B. Gibbons,et al.  SybilGuard: Defending Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks , 2006, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[9]  Wesley W. Chu,et al.  Protecting Private Information in Online Social Networks , 2008, Intelligence and Security Informatics.

[10]  Sonja Buchegger,et al.  A case for P2P infrastructure for social networks - opportunities & challenges , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Conference on Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services.

[11]  Philip W. L. Fong,et al.  A Privacy Preservation Model for Facebook-Style Social Network Systems , 2009, ESORICS.

[12]  Sonja Buchegger,et al.  PeerSoN: P2P social networking: early experiences and insights , 2009, SNS '09.

[13]  Panagiotis Papadimitratos,et al.  Privacy-Preserving Relationship Path Discovery in Social Networks , 2009, CANS.

[14]  Barbara Carminati,et al.  Enforcing access control in Web-based social networks , 2009, TSEC.

[15]  Shyhtsun Felix Wu,et al.  All Friends Are Not Created Equal: An Interaction Intensity Based Approach to Privacy in Online Social Networks , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[16]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[17]  Lee,et al.  Social Network Service , 2012 .