A Novel Scheme for Abatement of Privacy Concern by Controlling the Reachability in Online Social Network

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) play a significant role to exchange the gamut of information from user oriented personal information to global marketing. Due to the pervasiveness of OSNs, the security and privacy control of information creates a threat. Nowadays the OSN is a platform of socializing which allows its users to take part in information spreading among its friend circle. The user-popularity grows linearly or exponentially depending upon how the users are connected to their friends as well as visibility-settings (like friends, friend-of-friend, public) of each. In many cases the users instead of the intended target discloses information to a wider audience being unaware of the data sharing and information flow policies through the social networks. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic model for social network based on the edge property of friendof relation using semantic web tools. Experiments conducted with a dataset, which is a snapshot of Facebook, show that it provides good blocking quality and privacy using the trust values of friend to tune the default settings.