Privacy Preserving Information Dispersal in Social Networks Based on Disposition to Privacy

Social networks are no more a phenomenon. They have assimilated into our daily lives and are a part of our being. It has become a vehicle that carries information on our triumphs, failures, social and societal views, travel and leisure activities. Information shared through social networks contain sensitive information that poses a serious threat to our privacy. One of the contributing factor in being victimised is, information reaching more than the intended audience. Ignorance towards risk posed, sheer neglect towards privacy or complexity in understanding the privacy settings are pushing the general public in the direction of privacy breaches. We address controlling the intended audience for the information posted on social networks in this work on privacy. The notion of disposition to privacy of the user in assessing his friends, has not been strongly addressed before. We propose a model for quantifying privacy where the user's disposition (personality) towards privacy decides which information is seen by whom. Access to information is driven through assigning visibility to groups of users, traditionally. We propose to shift this access control to category. Category is a virtual container of information, profile items and general posts included. By this shift, we contend that information privacy is intuitive and hassle free from end users perspective thereby assisting to have a tight control over sensitive information.