Relationship Strength Based Privacy for the Online Social Networks

Abstract

The trend of communication is changing from mobile messages to the online social networks, for example, Facebook. The social networking applications and websites provide many of the characteristics, such as personal photo sharing. On the positive side by that many individuals form the social relationships. However, the online social networks may lead to the misuse of personal information and its disclosure. The social networks are static and assume equal values for the individuals who are directly connected. On the other hand, in real life the social relationships are dynamic and they are based on different attributes such as location, family background, neighborhood and many more. In order to be secure from the undesirable consequences due to personal information leakage, the effective mechanisms are required. In this paper, a model is proposed for the privacy in online social networks. The proposed model restricts the disclosure of personal information to the individuals. The information of one individual may be disclosed based on the relationship strength and the context. The implementation of this model on the social networks reduces the percentage of information disclosure to the less known individuals.