Collaborative Privacy Management in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are widely used media for users to share various types of contents with their connections. These contents tend to contain private information of users. In most cases, the extent of privacy might not just include the publisher of the content, but also other OSN users that are related to it. Satisfying all privacy requirements of the related users for a content is an important but difficult task, since these requirements might be in conflict. Hence, resolution of the privacy disputes in such cases is essential. Accordingly, we propose a collaborative privacy management system with an agent-based model, where agents represent users and manage their privacy requirements with a modified version of Clarke-Tax mechanism that achieves fair handling of privacy settings and taxes the agents whose privacy settings are chosen.