Sharing private data in online social networks

Abstract

With the development of Web 2.0 and sensing technologies, private information such as email messages, health records, discussion histories, could be obtained by Web visitors easily. Private data owners often have no idea about who are accessing the data and for what purposes. The rising popularity of various social networking websites has created a huge privacy problem. In this thesis, we investigate the private data sharing problem among Web users in online social networks. A framework is proposed for private data management by extending existing Web privacy management techniques. We propose to build a “trust network” with transitive relationships to allow controlled data sharing so that the privacy and preferences of data owners can be managed. We study how to obtain a trust relationship from existing relationships in social networks, how to analyze relationships from user activity logs where the social network is dynamically changed, and how to identify identical users from published data when users are located in different social networks. Popular applications are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the trust network.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology