Detecting and Resolving Privacy Conflicts for Collaborative Data Sharing in Online Social Networks

We have seen tremendous growth in online social networks (OSNs) in recent years. These OSNs not only offer attractive means for virtual social interactions and information sharing, but also raise a number of security and privacy issues. Although OSNs allow a single user to govern access to her/his data, they currently do not provide any mechanism to enforce privacy concerns over data associated with multiple users, remaining privacy violations largely unresolved and leading to the potential disclosure of information that at least one user intended to keep private. In this paper, we propose an approach to enable collaborative privacy management of shared data in OSNs. In particular, we provide a systematic mechanism to identify and resolve privacy conflicts for collaborative data sharing. Our conflict resolution indicates a tradeoff between privacy protection and data sharing by quantifying privacy risk and sharing loss. We also discuss a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of our approach as part of an application in Facebook and provide system evaluation and usability study of our methodology.