My Friend Leaks My Privacy: Modeling and Analyzing Privacy in Social Networks

With the dramatically increasing participation in online social networks (OSNs), huge amount of private information becomes available on such sites. It is critical to preserve users' privacy without preventing them from socialization and sharing. Unfortunately, existing solutions fall short meeting such requirements. We argue that the key component of OSN privacy protection is protecting (sensitive) content -- privacy as having the ability to control information dissemination. We follow the concepts of private information boundaries and restricted access and limited control to introduce a social circle model. We articulate the formal constructs of this model and the desired properties for privacy protection in the model. We show that the social circle model is efficient yet practical, which provides certain level of privacy protection capabilities to users, while still facilitates socialization. We then utilize this model to analyze the most popular social network platforms on the Internet (Facebook, Google+, WeChat, etc), and demonstrate the potential privacy vulnerabilities in some social networks. Finally, we discuss the implications of the analysis, and possible future directions.