Social Interaction Based Audience Segregation for Online Social Networks

Online social networking is the latest craze that has captured the attention of masses, people use these sites to communicate with their friends and family. These sites offer attractive means of social interactions and communications, but also raise privacy concerns. This paper examines user’s abilities to control access to their personal information posted in online social networks. Online social networks lack common mechanism used by individuals in their real life to manage their privacy. The lack of such mechanism significantly affects the level of user control over their self presentation in online social networks. In this paper, we present social interaction based audience segregation model for online social networks. This model mimics real life interaction patterns and makes online social networks more privacy friendly. Our model uses type, frequency, and initiation factor of social interactions to calculate friendship strength. The main contribution of the model is that it considers set of all possible interactions among friends and assigns a numerical weight to each type of interaction in order to increase or decrease its contribution in calculation of friendship strength based on its importance in the development of relationship ties.