Privacy Risk Analysis of Online Social Networks

The social benefit derived from Online Social Networks (OSNs) can lure users to reveal unprecedented volumes of personal data to an online audience that is much less trustworthy than their offline social circle. Even if a user hides his personal data from some users and shares with others, privacy settings of OSNs may be bypassed, thus leading to various privacy harms such as identity theft, stalking, or discrimination. Therefore, users need to be assisted in understanding the privacy risks of their OSN profiles as well as managing their privacy settings so as to keep such risks in check, while still deriving the benefits of social network participation.

This book presents to its readers how privacy risk analysis concepts such as privacy harms and risk sources can be used to develop mechanisms for privacy scoring of user profiles and for supporting users in privacy settings management in the context of OSNs. Privacy scoring helps detect and minimize the risks due to the dissemination and use of personal data. The book also discusses many open problems in this area to encourage further research.

Sourya Joyee De is an Assistant Professor in IT & Systems at Indian Institute of Management Raipur, India. She is a Fellow of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (Ph.D.). Prior to joining IIM Raipur, Sourya held research positions at INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes and LORIA-CNRS-INRIA Nancy Grand-Est, France for close to four years. Her research has been funded by the French ANR project BIOPRIV, CISCO San Jose, CA, USA, Samsung GRO Grant, INRIA Project Lab CAPPRIS, and the Grand-Est Region, France. Sourya was also a Visiting Scientist at Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India. Her research interests include privacy risk analysis, user consent in the context of privacy, privacy policies, security in cloud computing, and rational cryptography. Her research has been published at various reputed journals and conferences. She has also published a book titled Privacy Risk Analysis with Morgan & Claypool Publishers, San Rafel, CA, USA.Abdessamad Imine received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees inComputer Science from University of Sciences and Technology of Oran (USTO), Algeria, and University Henri Poincaré of Nancy, France, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor HdR at Lorraine University and senior researcher at LORIA center of Nancy. His research interests include privacy in social networks, security for collaborative systems, optimistic protocols, and formal methods. Abdessamad Imine has developed a formal methodology for specifying and verifying the consistency of synchronized objects by operational transformation. This methodology has been successfully used in the design of a configuration management system in the LibreSource project. He has also devised protocols for controlling and enforcing privacy in social networks and protocols for synchronizing and securing shared data such as text, XML, and RDF documents. He is author and co-author of more than 82 papers in international conferences, journals, and books.