A reputation-based privacy management system for social networking sites

Abstract

Social networking sites form a special type of virtual community where we share our personal information with people and develop new relationships on the Internet. These sites allow the users to share just about everything, including photos, videos, favorite music, and games, and record all user interactions and retain them for potential use in social data mining. This storing and sharing of large amounts of information causes privacy problems for the users of these websites. In order to prevent these problems, we have to provide strict privacy policies, data protection mechanisms, and trusted and built-in applications that help to protect user privacy by limiting the people who get access to a user's personal information. Thus, the privacy problem has prompted us to provide a solution that offers the users of these social networking websites an opportunity to protect their information. In this paper, a social networking application and its system design, algorithm, and database structure are described. Our application offers a reputation-based trusted architecture to social network users. It creates and monitors social reputations, finds social circles, and helps the users to group their friends easily, meaningfully, and automatically to protect their privacy. This system provides the grouping of users through an automated system into different social circles by analyzing the user's social connections depending on what common information or application they share that should not be accessed by other users.