Title
Need for Symmetry: Addressing Privacy Risks in Online Social Networks
Abstract
Private attributes of Online Social Network (OSN) users can be inferred from other information (which is usually from users' friends and group information). To address this, social networking sites allow users to hide their friend lists and group lists, so that general public cannot see them. However, if a user doesn't make his friend list public, but his friends have public friend list where we can find him, we can do reverse lookup to extend the friend lists of the user. Furthermore, many social networks allow non-group members to list the members of public groups (e.g., Face book). These are strong violations of OSN users' privacy, and can be considered as privacy risks caused by the asymmetric configuration of settings in OSNs. In this paper we present the privacy risks due to the lack of symmetric configurations, which exist in most of the OSNs. To make our idea more clear, we propose a inference attack and show that it can be used to infer users' private information, even users already made their friend list private. We theoretically analyze the risk of proposed privacy issues, and evaluate the risk using experiments based on real-world OSN data. We show that it is not sufficient to only disable friend list and group list to guarantee privacy, and propose methods to mitigate these privacy issues.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/AINA.2011.57
AINA
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
friend lists,privacy issue,friend list,social network,data privacy,group list,privacy risks,privacy,disable friend list,friend list public,privacy risk,facebook,public friend list,proposed privacy issue,general public,inference attack,online social networks,social networking (online),public group,inference,bayesian methods,bayesian method
Conference
1550-445X E-ISBN : 978-0-7695-4337-6
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-0-7695-4337-6
1
0.39
References 
Authors
15
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cong Tang1207.18
Yonggang Wang2134.04
Hu Xiong314416.81
Tao Yang4105.65
Jianbin Hu517922.43
Qingni Shen67122.47
Zhong Chen750358.35