Privacy preservation in online social networks

Abstract

The development of Online Social Networks OSN has seen phenomenal growth and people of all ages from diverse cultural background are using it for sharing information To provide an extended list of services to customers OSN incorporates Third Party Application TPA Services offered by different vendors Apart from this the OSN also serves as an identity provider for many other third party services In both cases when accessing the service for the first time users are prompted to share their attributes optional and required attributes Services are denied to users who deny sharing of the required attributes While users trusting the OSN share their attributes with OSN the same is not expected to be transitive However the users are enticed to share their attributes for using the TPA s services thereby opening channels for privacy infringement TPAs access the user s data through APIs provided by the OSN Once TPA gets control of the users information the users control over the data is entirely lost When the users install multiple applications catering to their needs they leave trails of sensitive personally identifiable information PII here and there These trails can be used to collectively infer more sensitive personal information about the user as well as their friends The implications to privacy violations does not end here as the PII can potentially transitively shared to fourth party agencies The ownership of the data is unclear in user OSN TPA data sharing scenario. newline