30,816 research outputs found
Reliable online social network data collection
Large quantities of information are shared through online social networks, making them attractive sources of data for social network research. When studying the usage of online social networks, these data may not describe properly usersâ behaviours. For instance, the data collected often include content shared by the users only, or content accessible to the researchers, hence obfuscating a large amount of data that would help understanding usersâ behaviours and privacy concerns. Moreover, the data collection methods employed in experiments may also have an effect on data reliability when participants self-report inacurrate information or are observed while using a simulated application. Understanding the effects of these collection methods on data reliability is paramount for the study of social networks; for understanding user behaviour; for designing socially-aware applications and services; and for mining data collected from such social networks and applications. This chapter reviews previous research which has looked at social network data collection and user behaviour in these networks. We highlight shortcomings in the methods used in these studies, and introduce our own methodology and user study based on the Experience Sampling Method; we claim our methodology leads to the collection of more reliable data by capturing both those data which are shared and not shared. We conclude with suggestions for collecting and mining data from online social networks.Postprin
Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services
Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social
profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph,
containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking
Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new
contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social
graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring
personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an
extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will
support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services
without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI &
Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS
Inferring Person-to-person Proximity Using WiFi Signals
Today's societies are enveloped in an ever-growing telecommunication
infrastructure. This infrastructure offers important opportunities for sensing
and recording a multitude of human behaviors. Human mobility patterns are a
prominent example of such a behavior which has been studied based on cell phone
towers, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi networks as proxies for location. However,
while mobility is an important aspect of human behavior, understanding complex
social systems requires studying not only the movement of individuals, but also
their interactions. Sensing social interactions on a large scale is a technical
challenge and many commonly used approaches---including RFID badges or
Bluetooth scanning---offer only limited scalability. Here we show that it is
possible, in a scalable and robust way, to accurately infer person-to-person
physical proximity from the lists of WiFi access points measured by smartphones
carried by the two individuals. Based on a longitudinal dataset of
approximately 800 participants with ground-truth interactions collected over a
year, we show that our model performs better than the current state-of-the-art.
Our results demonstrate the value of WiFi signals in social sensing as well as
potential threats to privacy that they imply
Preserving Co-Location Privacy in Geo-Social Networks
The number of people on social networks has grown exponentially. Users share
very large volumes of personal informations and content every days. This
content could be tagged with geo-spatial and temporal coordinates that may be
considered sensitive for some users. While there is clearly a demand for users
to share this information with each other, there is also substantial demand for
greater control over the conditions under which their information is shared.
Content published in a geo-aware social networks (GeoSN) often involves
multiple users and it is often accessible to multiple users, without the
publisher being aware of the privacy preferences of those users. This makes
difficult for GeoSN users to control which information about them is available
and to whom it is available. Thus, the lack of means to protect users privacy
scares people bothered about privacy issues. This paper addresses a particular
privacy threats that occur in GeoSNs: the Co-location privacy threat. It
concerns the availability of information about the presence of multiple users
in a same locations at given times, against their will. The challenge addressed
is that of supporting privacy while still enabling useful services.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
Online Privacy as a Collective Phenomenon
The problem of online privacy is often reduced to individual decisions to
hide or reveal personal information in online social networks (OSNs). However,
with the increasing use of OSNs, it becomes more important to understand the
role of the social network in disclosing personal information that a user has
not revealed voluntarily: How much of our private information do our friends
disclose about us, and how much of our privacy is lost simply because of online
social interaction? Without strong technical effort, an OSN may be able to
exploit the assortativity of human private features, this way constructing
shadow profiles with information that users chose not to share. Furthermore,
because many users share their phone and email contact lists, this allows an
OSN to create full shadow profiles for people who do not even have an account
for this OSN.
We empirically test the feasibility of constructing shadow profiles of sexual
orientation for users and non-users, using data from more than 3 Million
accounts of a single OSN. We quantify a lower bound for the predictive power
derived from the social network of a user, to demonstrate how the
predictability of sexual orientation increases with the size of this network
and the tendency to share personal information. This allows us to define a
privacy leak factor that links individual privacy loss with the decision of
other individuals to disclose information. Our statistical analysis reveals
that some individuals are at a higher risk of privacy loss, as prediction
accuracy increases for users with a larger and more homogeneous first- and
second-order neighborhood of their social network. While we do not provide
evidence that shadow profiles exist at all, our results show that disclosing of
private information is not restricted to an individual choice, but becomes a
collective decision that has implications for policy and privacy regulation
A place-focused model for social networks in cities
The focused organization theory of social ties proposes that the structure of
human social networks can be arranged around extra-network foci, which can
include shared physical spaces such as homes, workplaces, restaurants, and so
on. Until now, this has been difficult to investigate on a large scale, but the
huge volume of data available from online location-based social services now
makes it possible to examine the friendships and mobility of many thousands of
people, and to investigate the relationship between meetings at places and the
structure of the social network. In this paper, we analyze a large dataset from
Foursquare, the most popular online location-based social network. We examine
the properties of city-based social networks, finding that they have common
structural properties, and that the category of place where two people meet has
very strong influence on the likelihood of their being friends. Inspired by
these observations in combination with the focused organization theory, we then
present a model to generate city-level social networks, and show that it
produces networks with the structural properties seen in empirical data.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures. IEEE/ASE SocialCom 201
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