User Interaction Based Framework for Protecting User Privacy in Online Social Networks

摘要

In the recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have gained high degree of popularity, with having billions of users. Users are revealing a massive amount of their private contents including their personal information to these OSNs, while believing them to protect their private contents. To enhance their services, many OSNs social networking sites have offered their open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Through APIs, they allow third party developers to develop social applications to provide additional functionalities to the users. Although these open interfaces have resulted into the improvement of OSNs but they have also put users at serious privacy risks through disclosure of their personal information to third-party applications and their developers. This paper suggests a secure framework where users can define fine-grained access control policies for social applications and dictate who may access what of their information. We believe in seeking an idea to provide a balance between users' privacy needs and application's needs to access users' information. Ultimately, the proposed framework is more universal, easy to understand, and easy to implement with requiring some of the changes in the current platform architectures.