Addressing the privacy management crisis in online social networks

The sharing of personal data has emerged as a popular activity over online social networking sites like Facebook. As a result, the issue of online social network privacy has received significant attention in both the research literature and the mainstream media. Our overarching goal is to improve defaults and provide better tools for managing privacy, but we are limited by the fact that the full extent of the privacy problem remains unknown; there is little quantification of the incidence of incorrect privacy settings or the difficulty users face when managing their privacy. In this talk, I will first focus on measuring the disparity between the desired and actual privacy settings, quantifying the magnitude of the problem of managing privacy. Later, I will discuss how social network analysis techniques can be leveraged towards addressing the privacy management crisis.