Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Privacy in Social Networks

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Privacy in a Digital, Networked World

Part of the book series: Computer Communications and Networks ((CCN))

Abstract

Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have gained a lot of popularity in recent years. These networks use a large amount of data that are highly valuable for different purposes. Hence, social networks become a potential vector for attackers to exploit. This chapter focuses on the security attacks and countermeasures used by social networks. Privacy issues and solutions in social networks are discussed and the chapter ends with an outline of some of the privacy challenges in the social networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/09/linkedin-hits-200-million-users-worldwide-adding-new-users-at-rate-of-two-per-second/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.linkedin.com/about-us.

  3. 3.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20100522004359/ http://www.friendster.com/info/presscenter.php?A=pr48.

  4. 4.

    http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/myspace-to-announce-one-million-new-users/?_r=0.

  5. 5.

    http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts.

  6. 6.

    http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm.

  7. 7.

    http://instagram.com/press/.

  8. 8.

    http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/facebook-buys-instagram-for-1-billion/.

  9. 9.

    https://newsroom.fb.com/key-Facts.

References

  1. Alufaisan Y, Campan A (2013) Preservation of centrality measures in anonymized social networks. In: Proceedings of the ASE/IEEE international conference on privacy, security, risk, and trust (PASSAT 2013), Washington D.C., USA

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barbaro M, Zeller T (2006) A face is exposed for AOL searcher no. 4417749. The New York Times, Published 9 Aug 2006

    Google Scholar 

  3. Barnes SB (2006) A privacy paradox: social networking in the United States. First Monday 11(9):11–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Beato F, Kohlweiss M, Wouters K (2011) Scramble! your social network data. In: Privacy enhancing technologies symposium (PETS), pp 211–225

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bernal J (2009) Web 2.0 and social networking for the enterprise: guidelines and examples for implementation and management within your organization. Pearson Education

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bhat CS (2008) Cyber bullying: overview and strategies for school counsellors, guidance officers, and all school personnel. Aust J Guid Couns 18(1):53–66

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Blocki J, Blum A, Datta A, Sheffet O (2013) Differentially private data analysis of social networks via restricted sensitivity. In: Proceedings of the conference on innovations in theoretical computer science (ITCS), pp 87–96. doi:10.1145/2422436.2422449

  8. Boyd DM (2003) Reflections on Friendster, trust and intimacy. In: Proceedings of the Fifth international conference on ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp 2003), Workshop application for the Intimate ubiquitous computing workshop, Seattle WA, USA

    Google Scholar 

  9. Boyd DM (2004) Friendster and publicly articulated social networking. In: Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2004 conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 1279–1282. ACM Press, New York NY, USA. doi:10.1145/985921.986043

  10. Boyd DM, Ellison NB (2007) Social network sites: definition, history, scholarship. J Comput-Mediat Commun 13(1):1–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Brenner J, Smith A (2013) 72 % of online adults are social networking site users. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/social-networking-sites.aspx

  12. Brown J, Broderick AJ, Lee NJ (2007) Word of mouth communication within online communities: conceptualizing the online social network. J Interact Mark 21(3):2–20. doi:10.1016/10.1002/dir.20082

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Campan A, TrutaTM (2008) A clustering approach for data and structural anonymity in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGKDD international workshop on privacy, security, and trust in KDD (PinKDD)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Chen R, Fung B, Yu PS, Desai B (2014) Correlated network publication via differential privacy. VLDB J 23(4):653–676. doi:10.1007/s00778-013-0344-8

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Cheng J, Fu AWC, Liu J (2010) K-isomorphism: privacy preserving network publication against structural attacks. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data (SIGMOD), pp 459–470

    Google Scholar 

  16. Choi D, Kim J (2004) Why people continue to play online games: in search of critical design factors to increase customer loyalty to online contents. Cyberpsychol Behav 7(1):11–24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Coleman JS (1988) Social capital in the creation of human capital. Am J Sociol 94:95–120. doi:10.1086/228943

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Consumer Reports (2012) Facebook and your privacy. Who sees the data you share on the biggest social network? Consumer Rep Mag

    Google Scholar 

  19. Dey R, Jelveh Z, Ross KW (2012) Facebook users have become much more private: alarge-scale study. In: PerCom Workshops, pp 346–352

    Google Scholar 

  20. Dingledine R, Mathewson N, Syverson P (2004) Tor: the second generation onion router. In: USENIX security symposium, pp 303–320

    Google Scholar 

  21. DiNucci D (1999) Fragmented future. Print 53(4):32

    Google Scholar 

  22. Duncan GT, Keller-McNulty SA, Stokes SL (2001) Disclosure risk vs. data utility: the R-U confidentiality map. Technical Report Number 121. National Institute of Statistical Sciences

    Google Scholar 

  23. Dwork C (2006) Differential privacy. In: Proceedings of the international colloquium on automata, languages, and programming (ICALP)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Editorial Board (2014) Edward Snowden, whistle-blower. The New York Times. Accessed 2 Jan 2014

    Google Scholar 

  25. Ellison NB, Steinfield C, Lampe C (2007) The benefits of Facebook “friends:” social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. J Comput-Mediat Commun 12(4):1143–1168. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Facebook (2014) Data use policy. https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/

  27. Goel V (2013) Facebook to update privacy policy, but adjusting settings is no easier. The New York Times. 29 Aug 2012

    Google Scholar 

  28. Gross R, Acquisti A (2005) Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, pp 71–80. doi:10.1145/1102199.1102214

  29. Guha S, Tang K, Francis P (2008) Noyb: privacy in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the First workshop on online social networks, pp 49–54

    Google Scholar 

  30. Guillen MF, Suarez SL (2005) Explaining the global digital divide: economic, political and sociological drivers of cross-national internet use. Soc Forces 84(2):681–708. doi:10.1353/sof.2006.0015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Gundry J (1992) Understanding collaborative learning in networked organizations. In: Kaye AR (ed) Collaborative learning through computer conferencing. Springer, Berlin, pp 167–178

    Google Scholar 

  32. Gundry J (2006) Web 0.0 social media. Knowledge Ability Ltd. http://www.knowab.co.uk/socialmedia.html

  33. Gupta A, Roth A, Ullman J (2012) Iterative constructions and private data release. In: Proceedings of the theory of cryptography conference (TCC), pp 339–356

    Google Scholar 

  34. Guynn J (2012) Facebook changes privacy controls again and takes a key one away. Los Angeles Times. Accessed 12 Dec 2012

    Google Scholar 

  35. Hargittai E (2008) Whose space? Differences among users and non-users of social network sites. J Comput-Mediat Commun 13(1):276–297. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00396.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Hay M, Miklau G, Jensen D, Weis P, Srivastava S (2007) Anonymizing social networks. Technical report, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    Google Scholar 

  37. Hay M, Li C, Miklau G, Jensen D (2009) Accurate estimation of the degree distribution of private networks. In: Proceedings of the international conference on data mining (ICDM)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Hoegg R, Martignoni R, Meckel M, Stanoevska K (2006) Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities. In: Proceedings of the GeNeMe (Gemeinschaften in NeuenMedien), Dresden, Germany, pp 23–37

    Google Scholar 

  39. Howard TW (2010) Design to thrive: creating social networks and online communities that last. Morgan Kaufmann

    Google Scholar 

  40. Izquierdo E (2011) Social networked media: advances and trends. In: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM workshop on social and behavioural networked media access, pp 1–2. ACM, New York, NY, USA. doi:10.1145/2072627.2072629

  41. Jabeur N, Zeadally S, Sayed B (2013) Mobile social networking applications. Commun ACM 56(3):71–79. doi:10.1145/2428556.2428573

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Jones R (1994) Digital’s world-wide web server: a case study. Comput Netw ISDN Syst 27(2):297–306. doi:10.1016/0169-7552(94)90144-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Kaplan AM, Haenlein M (2010) Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Bus Horiz 53(1):59–68. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Kaplan AM, Haenlein M (2011) The early bird catches the news: nine things you should know about micro-blogging. Bus Horiz 54(2):105–113. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2010.09.004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Karwa V, Raskhodnikova S, Smith A, Yaroslavtsev G (2011) Private analysis of graph structure. Proc VLDB Endow 4(11):1146–1157

    Google Scholar 

  46. Karwa V, Slavkovic A (2012) Differentially private graphical degree sequences and synthetic graphs. In: Proceedings of the privacy on statistical databases conference. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 7556, pp 273–285

    Google Scholar 

  47. Kasiviswanathan S, Nissim K, Raskhodnikova S, Smith A (2013) Analyzing graphs with node differential privacy. In: Proceedings of the theory of cryptography conference (TCC), pp 457–476

    Google Scholar 

  48. Katz JE, Rice RE, Aspden P (2001) The Internet, 1995-2000: access, civic involvement, and social interaction. Am Behav Sci 45(3):405–419. doi:10.1177/0002764201045003004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Kietzmann JH, Hermkens K, McCarthy IP, Silvestre BS (2011) Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Bus Horiz 54(3):241–251. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Kim A. J. 2000. Community building on the Web. Peachpit Press

    Google Scholar 

  51. Kirkpatrick D. 2010. The facebook effect. Simon and Schuster

    Google Scholar 

  52. Lane N, Walton-Flynn N, Benlamlih F (2008) Mobile social networking. Informa UK Limited. http://www.telecoms.com/files/2009/05/buongiorno_final-fmt_nl-3110-f.pdf

  53. Lenhart A, Madden M (2007) Teens, privacy and online social networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace. Pew Internet and American Life Project. http://apo.org.au/?q=node/16750

  54. Liu K, Terzi E (2008) Towards identity anonymization on graphs. In: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data, pp 93–106

    Google Scholar 

  55. Lucas M, Borisov N (2008) Flybynight: mitigating the privacy risks of social networking. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM workshop on privacy in the electronic society (WPES), pp 1–8

    Google Scholar 

  56. Luo W, Xie Q, Hengartner U (2009) FaceCloack: an architecture for user privacy on social networking sites. In: Proceedings of the international conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), vol 3, pp 26–33

    Google Scholar 

  57. Morris MG, Venkatesh V (2000) Age differences in technology adoption decisions: implications for a changing work force. Pers Psychol 53(2):375–403. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.2000.tb00206.x

  58. Muramatsu J, Ackerman M (1998) Computing, social activity, and entertainment: afield study of a game MUD. Comput Support Coop Work (CSCW) 7(1–2):87–122. doi:10.1023/A:1008636204963

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Murchu IO, Breslin JG, Decker S (2004) Online social and business networking communities. In: Proceedings of the ECAI 2004 workshop on application of semantic web technologies to web communities, pp 241–267. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5

  60. Murugesan S (2007) Understanding Web 2.0. IT Professional 9(4):34–41. doi:10.1109/MITP.2007.78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Nobari S, Karras P, Pang H, Bressan S (2014) L-Opacity: Linkage-Aware Graph Anonymization. In: Proceedings of the international conference on extending database technology (EDBT), pp 583–594

    Google Scholar 

  62. O’Brien CN (2011) The first Facebook firing case under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act: exploring the limits of labor law protection for concerted communication on social media. Suffolk Univ Law Rev 45:29–66

    Google Scholar 

  63. Olson P (2013) Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messenger apps. Obs J. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/10/teenagers-messenger-apps-facebook-exodus. Accessed 9 Nov 2013

  64. Quercia D, Lathia N, Calabrese F, Di Lorenzo G, Crowcroft J (2010) Recommending social events from mobile phone location data. In: Proceedings of the IEEE 10th international conference on in data mining (ICDM), pp 971–976. doi:10.1109/ICDM.2010.152

  65. Rafaeli S, Larose RJ (1993) Electronic Bulletin boards and “Public Goods” explanations of collaborative mass media. Commun Res 20(2):277–297. doi:10.1177/009365093020002005

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Raynes-Goldie KS (2012) Privacy in the age of Facebook: discourse, architecture, consequences. PhD Thesis, Curtin University

    Google Scholar 

  67. Rome Memorandum (2008) Report and Guidance on Privacy in Social Networks Services—“Rome Memorandum”. In: International working group on data protection in telecommunications, Rome, Italy

    Google Scholar 

  68. Rosenblum D (2007) What anyone can know: the privacy risks of social networking sites. IEEE Secur Privacy 5(3):40–49. doi:10.1109/MSP.2007.75

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  69. Shen X (Sherman) (2013) Security and privacy in mobile social network [Editor’s Note]. IEEE Netw 27(5):2–3. doi:10.1109/MNET.2013.6616107

  70. Shuen A (2008) Web 2.0: astrategy guide. O’Reilly Media, Inc

    Google Scholar 

  71. Squicciarini AC, Griffin C (2012) An informed model of personal information release in social networking sites. Proceedings of the 2012 International conference on privacy, security, risk and trust and 2012 International conference on social computing, pp 636–645. doi:10.1109/SocialCom-PASSAT.2012.137

  72. Squicciarini A, Shehab M, Wede J (2010) Privacy policies for shared content in social network sites. VLDB J

    Google Scholar 

  73. Stutzman F, Gross R, Acquisti A (2012) Silent listeners: the evolution of privacy and disclosure on Facebook. J Privacy Confid 4(2):7–41

    Google Scholar 

  74. Tassa T, Cohen DJ (2013) Anonymization of centralized and distributed social networks by sequential clustering. IEE Trans Data Knowl Eng 25(2):311–324. doi:10.1109/TKDE.2011.232

    Article  Google Scholar 

  75. Travers J, Milgram S (1969) An experimental study of the small world problem. Sociometry 32(4):425–443. doi:10.2307/2786545

    Article  Google Scholar 

  76. Valkenburg PM, Peter J, Schouten AP (2006) Friend networking sites and their relationship to adolescents’ well-being and social self-esteem. Cyber Psychol Behav 9(5):584–590. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9.584

    Article  Google Scholar 

  77. Wang C-JL, Wang ET, Chen ALP (2013) Anonymization for multiple released social network graphs. Adv Knowl Discov Data Mining LNCS 7819:99–110. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-37456-2_9

    Google Scholar 

  78. West A, Lewis J, Currie P (2009) Students’ Facebook “friends”: public and private spheres. J Youth Stud 12(6):615–627. doi:10.1080/13676260902960752

    Article  Google Scholar 

  79. Yamada A, Kim TH, Perrig A (2012) Exploiting privacy policy conflicts in online social networks. In: CMU-CyLab-12-005, Carnegie Mellon University

    Google Scholar 

  80. Zheleva E, Getoor L (2011) Privacy in social networks: a survey. Chapter in Social network data analytics. Springer Science and Business Media

    Google Scholar 

  81. Zhou B, Pei J (2008) Preserving privacy in social networks against neighborhood attacks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on data engineering (ICDE), pp 506–515

    Google Scholar 

  82. Zou L, Chen L, Ozsu TM (2009) K-automorphism: a general framework for privacy preserving network publication. In: Proceedings of the international conference on very large data bases (VLDB)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, College of Informatics Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY, 41099, USA

    Traian Marius Truta

  2. College of Communication and Information, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40516, USA

    Michail Tsikerdekis & Sherali Zeadally

Authors
  1. Traian Marius Truta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Michail Tsikerdekis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sherali Zeadally
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Traian Marius Truta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA

    Sherali Zeadally

  2. Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Mohamad Badra

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Truta, T.M., Tsikerdekis, M., Zeadally, S. (2015). Privacy in Social Networks. In: Zeadally, S., Badra, M. (eds) Privacy in a Digital, Networked World. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08470-1_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08470-1_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08469-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08470-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation