Assisting humans in privacy management: an agent-based approach

Image sharing is a service offered by many online social networks. In order to preserve privacy of images, users need to think through and specify a privacy setting for each image that they upload. This is difficult for two main reasons: first, research shows that many times users do not know their own privacy preferences, but only become aware of them over time. Second, even when users know their privacy preferences, editing these privacy settings is cumbersome and requires too much effort, interfering with the quick sharing behavior expected on an online social network. Accordingly, this paper proposes a privacy recommendation model for images using tags and an agent that implements this, namely pelte. Each user agent makes use of the privacy settings that its user have set for previous images to predict automatically the privacy setting for an image that is uploaded to be shared. When in doubt, the agent analyzes the sharing behavior of other users in the user’s network to be able to recommend to its user about what should be considered as private. Contrary to existing approaches that assume all the images are available to a centralized model, pelte is compatible to distributed environments since each agent accesses only the privacy settings of the images that the agent owner has shared or those that have been shared with the user. Our simulations on a real-life dataset shows that pelte can accurately predict privacy settings even when a user has shared a few images with others, the images have only a few tags or the user’s friends have varying privacy preferences.