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Privacy Implications of Privacy Settings and Tagging in Facebook

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Secure Data Management (SDM 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8425))

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Abstract

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. Users share personal information about themselves and other users in order to build and maintain their social network. However, the large amount of personal information available on social networks poses risks of data misuse. Although social networks offer users the possibility to specify privacy settings to regulate access to their information, these settings are often complicated and unintuitive, especially when dealing with new modalities of social communication like tagging. In this paper we investigate the privacy consequences of information sharing in social networks. In particular, we formally analyze the impact of the privacy settings and the use of tagging in Facebook on the visibility of information. To increase users’ awareness of the risks of information sharing and empower users to control their information, we present a tool for determining the visibility of users’ information based on their privacy settings and tagging.

This work is funded by the Dutch national program COMMIT through the THeCS project.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although Facebook also allows users to include tags in comments, we do not consider such tags in the paper as they do not change the visibility of objects.

  2. 2.

    Bob’s friend and Alice have to be friends as this is a requirement for tagging in Facebook.

  3. 3.

    The rules for images and albums are similar to the ones for posts.

  4. 4.

    A tag can be inserted in a post only when the post is created. Accordingly, the tag issuer and data provider coincide for posts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Stan Damen & Nicola Zannone

Authors
  1. Stan Damen
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  2. Nicola Zannone
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicola Zannone .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. EIT ICT Labs/University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Willem Jonker

  2. Philips Research/Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Milan Petković

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Damen, S., Zannone, N. (2014). Privacy Implications of Privacy Settings and Tagging in Facebook. In: Jonker, W., Petković, M. (eds) Secure Data Management. SDM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8425. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06811-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06811-4_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06810-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06811-4

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