TAL: Threats All Around - An approach towards enhancing User Privacy on Online Social Networks

Today, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have emerged as a very effective and popular means of communication among people from different region, religion age, sex, educational background, ethnicity etc. Popular OSNs include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. However, the recent Facebook Data Scandal of data breach has created many question of user's data privacy. Researchers have found users to be much reckless towards protecting information at their own end. Due to weak privacy settings, users become vulnerable to OSNs attacks such as information leakage, identity theft, cyberbullying, online harassment etc. In our work, I have discussed different privacy threats related to the OSNs users. I have also conducted a survey based on the user perception about Online Social Network (OSN) privacy and protecting his/her information from misuse. Based on our background study and our survey results, I have proposed a feature, in order to, make user aware of OSN's weak privacy settings. This feature will review user privacy settings and classify those settings standard as Safe, Unsafe and Critical Unsafe. A Pie graph used to show aforementioned classification while getting login to his/her favorite OSN. This feature can be adopted by any popular OSNs, thus creating privacy awareness among user. Through applying this feature, an OSN user can view the level of privacy settings, thus, minimizing the chances for being victim to any OSN threat.