Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Web-Traveler Policies for Images on Social Networks

  • Published:
World Wide Web Aims and scope Submit manuscript

An Erratum to this article was published on 17 March 2010

Abstract

Images are one of the most popular type of contents shared on these sites. One of the most popular types of contents shared on these sites is image. Most of these networks offer some rudimentary forms of access controls such as allowing the users to choose who can view their profiles or the images uploaded by them. These controls however apply only in the perimeter of the users’ direct control such as desktops, profiles etc. Users have no control over their content once it is downloaded by others. In order to enable a user to truly maintain control over his content, new access control mechanisms must be designed so as to enable users to control their content even when managed by others. Towards fulfilling this gap, in this paper we propose the concept of “web-traveler policies”. Web-traveler policies allow the user to specify who can view, upload or download a given image within a social network. The unique, innovative feature of web-traveler policies is that they travel with the image, as long as it is hosted on the given social networking site. Additionally, we explore the possibility of extending these controls across different sites, by using the concept of mashups. In the paper we prove the feasibility of this approach, by implementing a working prototype of our approach on a real open source social network platform. We test the performance and scalability of such architecture under heavy user loads and also its resilience towards naïve attacks. This work is a first innovative step toward scalable systems for providing each user with a centralized system for his/her own content’s protection all over the web.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. ABC Media Watch, Filleting Facebook. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 29 October 07 http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/ transcripts/s2074079.htm. Accessed October 2008

  2. Acquisti, A., Gross, R.: Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (pp. 36–58). Cambridge, U.K: Robinson College, June 28–30

  3. Cai, D., Shao, Z., He, X., Yan, X., Han, J.: Mining Hidden Community in Heterogeneous Social Networks, LinkKDD (2005)

  4. Carminati, B., Ferrari, E., Perego, A.: Private relationships in social networks. ICDE Workshops 163–17 (2007)

  5. Carminati, B., Ferrari, E. Privacy-aware collaborative access control in Web-based social networks. In DBSec, pp. 81–96 (2008)

  6. Casassa Mont, M., Pearson, S., Bramhall, P.: Towards accountable management of identity and privacy: sticky policies and enforceable tracing services. 14th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, pp. 377–382 (2003)

  7. Chang, E., Li, C., Wang, J., Mork, P., Wiederhold, G.: Searching near- replicas of images via clustering. Proc. Int’l Soc. for Optical Eng. (SPIE) Symp. Voice, Video, and Data Comm., Sept. (1999)

  8. Chen, H., i Ikeuchi, N., Jin, Q.: Implementation of ubiquitous personal study using Web 2.0 mash-up and OSS technologies. AINA Workshops 1573–1578 (2008)

  9. “DRM vs. ERM: Battle to Control Data”, Network World”. Retrieved on 2008-04-02

  10. Dwyer, C., Hiltz, R., Passerini K.: Trust and Privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace. Proceedings of AMCIS 2007, Keystone, CO, (2007)

  11. Facebook. www.facebook.com . Accessed December (2008)

  12. B. Ferguson, sitepoint. Watermark Images on the Fly in PHP, September 5, 2004. <http://www.sitepoint.com/article/watermark-images-php/>

  13. Gates, C.: Access control requirements for Web 2.0 Security and Privacy. Workshop on Web 2.0 Security and Privacy, IEEE Oakland (2007)

  14. Gollu, K.K., Stefan Saroiu, A.W.: A social networking-based access control scheme for personal content. 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ‘07)’, (2007)

  15. Google’s OpenSocial could invite trouble. Forbes.com, November 14, 2007. https://hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=24852

  16. A. Greenberg Google Opensocial—google code, 2007. <http://code. google.com/apis/opensocial/. >

  17. Gross, R., Acquisti, A.: Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, (2005)

  18. Hsiao, J.H., Chen, C.S., Chien, L.F., Chen, M.S.: A new approach to image copy detection based on extended feature sets. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. v16 i8. 2069–2079

  19. Hobgen, G.: Security issues and recommendations for online social networks. Position Paper ENISA (2007)

  20. Jacobs, C.E., Finkelstein, A., Salesin, D.H.: Fast multiresolution image querying. In Proceedings of ACM SIG-GRAPH, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 277–286, Los Angeles, CA, (1995)

  21. Jacobs, C.E., Finkelstein, A., Salesin, D.H.: Fast Multiresolution Image Querying .<http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/query/>

  22. Johnson, R., Hart, M., Stent, A.: Content-based access control. IEEE Web 2.0 Privacy and Security Workshop, Oakland, CA, May (2007)

  23. Kihl, M., Robertsson, A., Andersson, A., Wittenmark, B.: Control-theoretic analysis of admission control mechanisms for Web server systems. World Wide Web 11(1), 93–116 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Kleinberg, J.M.: Challenges in mining social network data: processes, privacy, and paradoxes. In Proc. 13th ACM SIGKDD, San Jose, CA, (2007)

  25. Levy, C. (February 3, 2003). Making Money with Streaming Media. www.streamingmedia.com. Retrieved on 2006-08-28

  26. Mannan, M., van Oorschot, P.C.: Privacy-enhanced sharing of personal content on the Web. In ACM World Wide Web Conference, pp. 487–496, (2008)

  27. Murray, G.: Asynchronous JavaScript technology and XML (Ajax) With the Java Platform. June 9, 2005; updated October 2006. < http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/ >

  28. Moffit, S.: Facebook averages—how do you measure up on friends , groups , apps , photos and wall posts. October 27, 2008. <http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/2007/10/facebook-averag.html>

  29. Ort, E., Basler, M.: Ajax Design Strategies. October 2006 < http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/DesignStrategies >

  30. Ort, E.: Introduction to Ajax for page authors. January 2007. < http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/IntroAjaxPageAuthors.html >

  31. Oasis Committee. XACML 2.0 Specification. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xacml#XACML20

  32. Sandhu, R.S., Coyne, E.J., Feinstein, H.L., Youman, C.E.: Role based access control models. Computer 29(2), 38–47 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Shehab, M., Squicciarini, A.C., Ahn, G.-J.: Beyond user-to-user access control for online social networks. International Conference on Information and Compute Security (ICICS). pp. 174–189 (2008)

  34. Squicciarini, A.C., Shehab, M., Paci, F.: Collective privacy management in social networks. ACM World Wide Web Conference, April (2009)

  35. Song, Y., Wang, W., Zhang, A.: Automatic annotation and retrieval of images. World Wide Web 6(2), 209–231 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. The Drupal Platform.www.drupal.org. Accessed December 11, 2008

  37. Varadharajan, V., Foster, D.: A security architecture for mobile agent based applications. World Wide Web 6(1), 93–122 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Yang, W.S., Dia, J.B., Cheng, H.C., Lin, H.T.: Mining social networks for targeted advertising. 39th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, IEEE Computer Society (2006)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Anna C. Squicciarini & Smitha Sundareswaran

Authors
  1. Anna C. Squicciarini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Smitha Sundareswaran
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna C. Squicciarini.

Additional information

An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11280-010-0085-1

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Squicciarini, A.C., Sundareswaran, S. Web-Traveler Policies for Images on Social Networks. World Wide Web 12, 461–484 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-009-0070-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-009-0070-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation