A centralized privacy-preserving framework for online social networks

Abstract

There are some critical privacy concerns in the current online social networks (OSNs). Users' information is disclosed to different entities that they were not supposed to access. Furthermore, the notion of friendship is inadequate in OSNs since the degree of social relationships between users dynamically changes over the time. Additionally, users may define similar privacy settings for their friends in an OSN. In this paper, we present a centralized privacy-preserving framework for OSNs to address these issues. Using the proposed approach, the users enforce confidentiality and access control on the shared data while their connections/relationships with other users are kept anonymous in OSNs. In this way, the users themselves create and modify personalized privacy settings for their shared data while employing each other's privacy settings. Detailed evaluations of the proposed framework show the advantages of the proposed architecture compared to the most analogous recent approach.