Privacy threat analysis of mobile social network data publishing

With mobile phones becoming integral part of modern life, the popularity of mobile social networking has tremendously increased over the past few years, bringing with it many benefits but also new trepidations. In particular, privacy issues in mobile social networking has recently become a significant concern. In this paper we present our study on the privacy vulnerability of the mobile social network data publication with emphases on a re-identification and disclosure attacks. We present a new technique for uniquely identifying a targeted individual in the anonymized social network graph and empirically demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach using a very large social network datasets. The results show that the proposed approach can uniquely re-identify a target on anonymized social network data with high success rate

Data Security and Anonymization in Neighborhood Attacks in Clustered Network in Internet of Things (NIoT)

In this paper author tries to focus on the review on the K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) tied by one or more specific types of inter dependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, conflict, or trade. Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. It also focuses the network analysis, application as well as problem statement. In this paper presents a outline for the privacy hazard and sharing the anonymized data in the network. This includes a proposed architecture design flow, for which the author considers the several variations and make connections. On several real-world social networks, we show that simple anonymization techniques are inadequate, it results in considerable breaks of privacy for even modestly informed opponents.  It also concentrates on a new anonymization technique. It based on the network and validate analytically that leads to saving of the privacy threat. It also analyses the effect that anonymizing the network has on the utility of the data for social network analysis

Social Network Services: Competition and Privacy

Social Network Services (SNS) business models highly depend on the gathering and analyzation of user data to obtain an advantage in competition for advertising clients. Nevertheless, an extensive collection and analysis of this data poses a threat to users’ privacy. Based on an economic perspective it seems rational for Social Network Operators (SNO) to ignore the users’ desire for privacy. However, privacy-friendly services might have the potential to earn users’ trust, leading to an increased revelation of personal data. Addressing these issues, we examine the existing privacy problem in SNS in the context of competition between SNO to investigate whether competition tend to enhance user privacy or whether it is the root of its violation. Therefore, this paper investigates the interconnectedness of the market structure and privacy problems in SNS. After analyzing the users’ and the advertisers’ side of SNS, their competitiveness and its influence on user privacy are examined

Bibliometric Survey of Privacy of Social Media Network Data Publishing

We are witness to see exponential growth of the social media network since the year 2002. Leading social media networking sites used by people are Twitter, Snapchats, Facebook, Google, and Instagram, etc. The latest global digital report (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2019) states that there exist more than 800 million current online social media users, and the number is still exploding day by day. Users share their day to day activities such as their photos and locations etc. on social media platforms. This information gets consumed by third party users, like marketing companies, researchers, and government firms. Depending upon the purpose, there is a possibility of misuse of the user\u27s personal & sensitive information. Users\u27 sensitive information breaches can further utilized for building a personal profile of individual users and also lead to the unlawful tracing of the individual user, which is a major privacy threat. Thus it is essential to first anonymize users\u27 information before sharing it with any of the third parties. Anonymization helps to prevent exposing sensitive information to the third party and avoids its misuse too. But anonymization leads to information loss, which indirectly affects the utility of data; hence, it is necessary to balance between data privacy and utility of data. This research paper presents a bibliometric analysis of social media privacy and provides the exact scope for future research. The research objective is to analyze different research parameters and get insights into privacy in Social Media Network (OSN). The research paper provides visualization of the big picture of research carried on the privacy of the social media network from the year 2010 to 2019 (covers the span of 19 years). Research data is taken from different online sources such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Research-gate. Result analysis has been carried out using open source tools such as Gephi and GPS Visualizer. Maximum publications of privacy of the social media network are from articles and conferences affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Science, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Social networking is a frequently used keyword by the researchers in the privacy of the online social media network. Major Contribution in this subject area is by the computer science research community, and the least research contribution is from art and science. This study will clearly give an understanding of contributions in the privacy of social media network by different organizations, types of contributions, more cited papers, Authors contributing more in this area, the number of patents in the area, and overall work done in the area of privacy of social media network

Factors influencing the use of privacy settings in location-based social networks

The growth of location-based social networks (LBSN) such as Facebook and Twitter has been rapid in recent years. In LBSNs, users provide location information on public profiles that potentially can be used in harmful ways. LBSNs have privacy settings that allow users to control the privacy level of their profiles, thus limiting access to location information by other users; but for various reasons users seldom make use of them. Using the protection motivation theory (PMT) as a theoretical lens, this dissertation examines whether users can be encouraged to use LBSN privacy settings through fear appeals. Fear appeals have been used in various studies to arouse fear in users, in order to motivate them to comply to an adaptive behaviour through the threat of impending danger. However, within the context of social networking, it is not yet clear how fear-inducing arguments will ultimately influence the use of privacy settings by users. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of fear appeals on user compliance, with recommendations to enact the use of privacy settings toward the alleviation of privacy threats. Using a survey methodology, 248 social-network users completed an instrument measuring the variables conceptualized by PMT. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the validity and reliability, and to analyze the data. Analysis of the responses show that PMT provides an explanation for the intention to use privacy settings by social-network users. Risk susceptibility, response efficacy, self-efficacy and response cost were found to have a positive impact on the intention to use privacy settings, while sharing benefits and maladaptive behaviours were found to have a negative impact on the intention to use privacy settings. However, risk severity and fear were not found to be significant predictors of the intention to use privacy settings. This study contributes to existing research on PMT in a sense that fear appeal should focus more on coping appraisal, rather than on threat appraisal which is consistent with the results of most studies on protection motivation

Data Mining Usage for Social Networks

The authors present in this work information about social media and data mining usage for that. It is represented information about social networking sites, where Facebook dominates the industry by boasting an account of 85% of the internet users worldwide. Applying data mining techniques to large social media data sets has the potential to continue to improve search results for everyday search engines, realize specialized target marketing for businesses, help psychologist study behavior, provide new insights into social structure for sociologists, personalize web services for consumers, and even help detect and prevent spam for all of us. The most common data mining applications related to social networking sites is represented. Authors have also given information about different data mining techniques and list of these techniques. It is important to protect personal privacy when working with social network data. Recent publications highlight the need to protect privacy as it has been shown that even anonymizing this type of data can still reveal personal information when advanced data analysis techniques are used. A whole range of different threat of social networks is represented. Authors explain cyber hygiene behaviors in social networks, such as backing up data, identity theft and online behavior

Privacy and Anonymization of Neighborhoods in Multiplex Networks

Since the beginning of the digital age, the amount of available data on human behaviour has dramatically increased, along with the risk for the privacy of the represented subjects. Since the analysis of those data can bring advances to science, it is important to share them while preserving the subjects' anonymity. A significant portion of the available information can be modelled as networks, introducing an additional privacy risk related to the structure of the data themselves. For instance, in a social network, people can be uniquely identifiable because of the structure of their neighborhood, formed by the amount of their friends and the connections between them. The neighborhood's structure is the target of an identity disclosure attack on released social network data, called neighborhood attack. To mitigate this threat, algorithms to anonymize networks have been proposed. However, this problem has not been deeply studied on multiplex networks, which combine different social network data into a single representation. The multiplex network representation makes the neighborhood attack setting more complicated, and adds information that an attacker can use to re-identify subjects. This thesis aims to understand how multiplex networks behave in terms of anonymization difficulty and neighborhood attack. We present two definitions of multiplex neighborhoods, and discuss how the fraction of nodes with unique neighborhoods can be affected. Through analysis of network models, we study the variation of the uniqueness of neighborhoods in networks with different structure and characteristics. We show that the uniqueness of neighborhoods has a linear trend depending on the network size and average degree. If the network has a more random structure, the uniqueness decreases significantly when the network size increases. On the other hand, if the local structure is more pronounced, the uniqueness is not strongly influenced by the number of nodes. We also conduct a motif analysis to study the recurring patterns that can make social networks' neighborhoods less unique. Lastly, we propose an algorithm to anonymize a pair of multiplex neighborhoods. This algorithm is the core building block that can be used in a method to prevent neighborhood attacks on multiplex networks

Security, Privacy and Safety Risk Assessment for Virtual Reality Learning Environment Applications

Social Virtual Reality based Learning Environments (VRLEs) such as vSocial render instructional content in a three-dimensional immersive computer experience for training youth with learning impediments. There are limited prior works that explored attack vulnerability in VR technology, and hence there is a need for systematic frameworks to quantify risks corresponding to security, privacy, and safety (SPS) threats. The SPS threats can adversely impact the educational user experience and hinder delivery of VRLE content. In this paper, we propose a novel risk assessment framework that utilizes attack trees to calculate a risk score for varied VRLE threats with rate and duration of threats as inputs. We compare the impact of a well-constructed attack tree with an adhoc attack tree to study the trade-offs between overheads in managing attack trees, and the cost of risk mitigation when vulnerabilities are identified. We use a vSocial VRLE testbed in a case study to showcase the effectiveness of our framework and demonstrate how a suitable attack tree formalism can result in a more safer, privacy-preserving and secure VRLE system.Comment: Tp appear in the CCNC 2019 Conferenc