Information-Sharing and Privacy in Social Networks

We present a new model for reasoning about the way information is shared among friends in a social network, and the resulting ways in which it spreads. Our model formalizes the intuition that revealing personal information in social settings involves a trade-off between the benefits of sharing information with friends, and the risks that additional gossiping will propagate it to people with whom one is not on friendly terms. We study the behavior of rational agents in such a situation, and we characterize the existence and computability of stable information-sharing networks, in which agents do not have an incentive to change the partners with whom they share information. We analyze the implications of these stable networks for social welfare, and the resulting fragmentation of the social network

Privacy in social networks: A comparative study

Social networks provide unprecedented opportunity for individuals and organizations to share information. At the same time they present significant challenges to privacy that left unaddressed will stifle information sharing and innovation. In this paper we analyse four different prototypical existing social networks, and identify key problems that arise for a privacy-by-design approach to the development of a new breed of social networks

The effect of privacy policies on information sharing behavior on social networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Online social networks (OSN) such as Facebook and Instagram have dramatically changed the way people operate. It, however, raises specific privacy concerns due to their inherent handling of personal data. The paper highlights the privacy concerns associated with OSN, strategies to protect the users’ privacy, and finally the overall effect of privacy policies on information sharing behavior on OSN. We examined a sample of 51 full papers that explore privacy concerns in OSN, strategies to protect users’ privacy, and the effects of privacy policies on the users’ information sharing behavior. The overall findings disclosed that users are concerned about their identity being stolen, and how third-party applications use their information. However, privacy policies do not have a direct impact on the information sharing behavior of OSN users. The findings help researchers and practitioners better understand the impact of privacy concern on users\u27 information sharing behaviors on OSN

User-Defined Privacy Location-Sharing System in Mobile Online Social Networks

With the fusion of social networks and location-based services, location sharing is one of the most important services in mobile online social networks (mOSNs). In location-sharing services, users have to provide their location information to service provider. However, location information is sensitive to users, which may cause a privacy-preserving issue needs to be solved. In the existing research, location-sharing services, such as friends’ query, does not consider the attacks from friends. In fact, a user may not trust all of his/her friends, so just a part of his/her friends will be allowed to obtain the user’s location information. In addition, users’ location privacy and social network privacy should be guaranteed. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a new architecture and a new scheme called User-Defined Privacy Location-Sharing (UDPLS) system for mOSNs. In our scheme, the query time is almost irrelevant to the number of friends. We also evaluate the performance and validate the correctness of our proposed algorithm through extensive simulations

The Law of Friction

“Frictionless sharing” became a Silicon Valley catchphrase in 2011. It refers to platforms such as Spotify or the Washington Post Social Reader that automatically publicize users’ activities in social networks like Facebook, rather than waiting for approval of each individual disclosure. This article carefully analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of frictionless sharing. Social media confers considerable advantages on individuals, their friends, and of course intermediaries like Spotify and Facebook. But many implementations of frictionless architecture have gone too far, potentially invading privacy and drowning useful information in a tide of meaningless spam. The article also dismantles the rhetoric of frictionless sharing. Because sharing is a volitional act, “frictionless sharing” is a contradiction in terms. In the physical world, too much friction can impede movement or even start fires, but too little would cause objects to slide off tables and cars off roads. The key to online disclosures also turns out to be the correct amount of friction, not its elimination. privacy, internet, computer, consumer, social networks, social media, Facebook, Netflix, frictionless sharin

Location privacy online:China, the Netherlands and South Korea

The aim of the study is to explore cross-cultural differences in users’ location privacy behaviour on LBSNs (location-based social networks) in China, the Netherlands and Korea. The study suggests evidence that Chinese, Dutch and Korean users exhibit different location privacy concerns, attitudes to social influence, perceived privacy control and willingness to share location-related information on LBSNs. The results show that in general, the more concerned users are about location privacy, the less they are willing to share and it also suggests that location privacy concern and social influence affect each other. Furthermore, the more control people perceive they have over their privacy, the more they are willing to share location information. A negative relationship between willingness to share location information and users’ actual sharing of location information was seen. In short, it is concluded that the relation between cultural values and location privacy behaviours only have a partial connection