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Preventing sensitive relationships disclosure for better social media preservation

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Abstract

A fundamental aspect of all social networks is information sharing. It is one of the most common forms of online interaction that is tightly associated with social media preservation and information disclosure. As such, information sharing is commonly viewed as a key enabler for social media preservation tasks. In the current situation, where information sharing and inter-user communications are made instantly possible via the widespread use of ubiquitous technologies, privacy related, and particularly information disclosure issues, are the obvious, much discussed, immediate consequences of information sharing. As a result, information disclosure, especially when multimedia data come to play, is critical for appropriate social media preservation strategies that consider and respect the privacy of social network users. Social media preservation must align with privacy protection solutions and consequently must protect sensitive information that social network users would like to keep private. In this paper, we propose a new approach to implement a privacy-oriented social media preservation strategy that prevents the disclosure of sensitive information. Instead of using a preserve-all strategy, we present a framework to personalize social media preservation tasks. We then describe our proposed rule-based algorithm to evaluate information disclosure addressing mainly relationship type disclosure and using shared photos. We also provide an experimental study to investigate the efficiency and the relevance of our approach.

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Notes

  1. http://www.facebook.com.

  2. http://www.linkedin.com.

  3. http://www.twitter.com.

  4. http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu.

  5. Library of Congress, NDIIPP Program Background, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/library/program_back.html.

  6. It represents any person that will, willingly or unwillingly, breach the user’s privacy and uncover sensitive information.

  7. Friend of a Friend (FOAF), http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/.

  8. The exchangeable image file format (EXIF), http://www.exif.org.

  9. SIOC Core Ontology Specification, (SIOC), http://sioc-project.org/ontology.

  10. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), http://dublincore.org.

  11. This type of replication allows to replicate the part of data that was modified without having to copy the entire content of the master database (“Public SN”) at each stimulating event.

  12. http://vocab.org/relationship/.html.

  13. By default, we consider the following categories: child (age \(\le \) 13), teenager ( 14 \(\le \) age \(\le \) 18), adult (19 \(\le \) age \(\le \) 60), and senior (age \(\ge \) 61).

  14. http://www.pewinternet.org/Press-Releases/2011/Socialnetworking-sites-and-our-lives.aspx.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada

    Elie Raad

  2. Antonine University, Baabda, Lebanon

    Bechara Al Bouna

  3. Laboratoire LIUPPA, University of Pau and Adour Countries, Bayonne, France

    Richard Chbeir

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  1. Elie Raad
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  2. Bechara Al Bouna
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  3. Richard Chbeir
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Correspondence to Bechara Al Bouna.

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Raad, E., Al Bouna, B. & Chbeir, R. Preventing sensitive relationships disclosure for better social media preservation. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 15, 173–194 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-015-0278-9

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