A reputation-based privacy management system for social networking sites

摘要

Social networking sites form a special type of virtualcommunity where we share our personal information with people anddevelop new relationships on the Internet. These sites allow theusers to share just about everything, including photos, videos,favorite music, and games, and record all user interactions and retainthem for potential use in social data mining. This storing andsharing of large amounts of information causes privacy problems forthe users of these websites. In order to prevent these problems, wehave to provide strict privacy policies, data protection mechanisms,and trusted and built-in applications that help to protect userprivacy by limiting the people who get access to a user's personalinformation. Thus, the privacy problem has prompted us to provide asolution that offers the users of these social networking websites anopportunity to protect their information. In this paper, a socialnetworking application and its system design, algorithm, and databasestructure are described. Our application offers a reputation-basedtrusted architecture to social network users. It creates and monitorssocial reputations, finds social circles, and helps the users to grouptheir friends easily, meaningfully, and automatically to protect theirprivacy. This system provides the grouping of users through anautomated system into different social circles by analyzing the user'ssocial connections depending on what common information or applicationthey share that should not be accessed by other users.