Security and Privacy in Social Networks: Data and Structural Anonymity

Social networking has become an inevitable catchline among teenagers as well as today’s older generation. In recent years, there has been observed remarkable growth in social networking sites, especially in terms of adaptability as well as popularity both in the media and academia. The information present on social networking sites is used in social, geographic and economic analysis, thereby giving meaningful insights. Although publishing of such analysis may create serious security threats, users sharing personal information on these social platforms may face privacy breach. Various third-party applications are making use of network data for advertisement, academic research and application development which can also raise security and privacy concerns. This chapter has a binary focus towards studying and analysing security and privacy threats prevailing and providing a detailed description regarding solutions that will aid towards sustaining user’s privacy and security. Currently, there exist multiple privacy techniques that propose solutions for maintaining user anonymity on online social networks. The chapter also highlights all the available techniques as well as the issue and challenges surrounding their real-world implementation. The goal of such mechanisms is to push deterged data on social platforms, thereby strengthening user privacy despite of the sensitive information shared on online social networks (OSN). While such mechanisms have gathered researcher’s attention for their simplicity, their ability to preserve the user’s privacy still struggles with regard to preserving useful knowledge contained in it. Thus, anonymization of OSN might lead to certain information loss. This chapter explores multiple data and structural anonymity techniques for modelling, evaluating and managing user’s privacy risks cum concerns with respect to online social networks (OSNs).