No abstract

With the evolution of Internet technology, social networking sites have gained a lot of popularity. People make new friends, share their interests, experiences in life, etc. With these activities on social sites, people generate a vast amount of data that is analyzed by third parties for various purposes. As such, publishing social data without protecting an individual’s private or confidential information can be dangerous. To provide privacy protection, this paper proposes a new degree anonymization approach k-NDDP, which extends the concept of k-anonymity and differential privacy based on Node DP for vertex degrees. In particular, this paper considers identity disclosures on social data. If the adversary efficiently obtains background knowledge about the victim’s degree and neighbor connections, it can re-identify its victim from the social data even if the user’s identity is removed. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a simple and, at the same time, effective method k–NDDP is proposed. The method is the extension of k-NMF, i.e., the state-of-the-art method to protect against mutual friend attack, to defend against identity disclosures by adding noise to the social data. Second, the achieved privacy using the concept of differential privacy is evaluated. An extensive empirical study shows that for different values of k, the divergence produced by k-NDDP for CC, BW and APL is not more than 0.8%, also added dummy links are 60% less, as compared to k-NMF approach, thereby it validates that the proposed k-NDDP approach provides strong privacy while maintaining the usefulness of data.

Facebook has promoted the use of informal language among both teens and adults. This social website has resulted in the deterioration of orthographic knowledge of both age groups due to the use of non-standard spellings. This social media engine has also contributed to the destruction of the word knowledge of users. Most of the users are aware of the context in which the English words are employed on Facebook but are unaware of their standard dictionary meanings. All these factors combine in effecting the formal academic writing and social interaction of these users. This research aims at finding out the language change due to the use of informal language, orthography, and words with multiple meanings on Facebook. The study has investigated the corrosion of the formal language of Facebook users. The current study was conducted by following the mixed-method approach in a way that twenty Facebook public pages, administrated by teens and adults were analyzed and also survey questionnaire filled by Intermediate and Graduate students. The results showed that teens are an easy victim of this up-thrust of technology as compared to adults. The results of the study gave a visual display of the effect of orthography by the use of informal language and the words with multiple meanings on social interactions and formal writing of both teens and adults.