A Peer-to-Peer Agent Community for Digital Oblivion in Online Social Networks

A long list of personal tragedies, including teenage suicides, has raised the importance of managing the personal information available on the Internet. It has been argued that it should be allowed to make mistakes, and that there should be a right to be forgotten. Unfortunately, today's Internet architecture and services typically do not support such functionality. We design a system that provides digital oblivion for users of online social networks. Participants form a peer-based agent community, which agree on protecting the privacy of individuals who request images to be forgotten. The system distributes and maintains up-to-date information on oblivion requests, and implements a filtering functionality when accessing an underlying online social network. We describe digital oblivion in terms of authentication of user-to-content relations and identify two user-to-content relations that are particularly relevant for digital oblivion. Finally, we design a family of protocols that provide digital oblivion with respect to these user-to-content relations, within the community that are implementing the protocol. Our protocols leverage a combination of digital signatures, watermarking, image tags, and trust management. No collaboration is required from the social network provider, although the system could also be incorporated as a standard feature of the social network.