Enabling Privacy-Awareness in Social Networks

Most social networks have implemented extensive and complex controls in order to battle the host of privacy concerns that initially plagued their online communities. These controls have taken the form of a-priori access control, which allow users to construct barriers preventing unwanted users from viewing their personal information. However, in cases in which the access restriction mechanisms are bypassed or when the access restrictions are met but the data is later misused, this system leaves users unprotected. Our framework, Respect My Privacy, proposes an alternative approach to the protection of privacy. Our strategy is similar to how legal and social rules work in our societies where the vast majority of these rules are not enforced perfectly or automatically, yet most of us follow the majority of the rules because social systems built up over thousands of years encourage us to do so and often make compliance easier than violation. Our project aims to support similar functionality in social networks. Instead of focusing on enforcing privacy policies through restricted access, we focus on helping users conform to existing policies by making them aware of the usage restrictions associated with the data. The framework has two main functions - generating privacy or usage control policies for social networks, and visualizing these policies while exploring social networks. We have implemented this functionality across three platforms: Facebook, OpenSocial and Tabulator, a Semantic Web browser. These applications enable users to specify privacy preferences for their data and then display this privacy-annotated data prominently enabling other users to easily recognize and conform to these preferences.