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Evaluating Privacy Risks in Social Networks from the User’s Perspective

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Advanced Research in Data Privacy

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 567))

Abstract

Determining privacy risks when publishing information on social networks often presents a challenge for the users. A measure of how much of sensitive information users shared with others on a social network website would help the users to understand whether they individually share too much. We survey existing measures that evaluate privacy from the user’s perspective or help the user with the privacy risks and related decisions in social networks. We present the Privacy Scores—a measurement of how much sensitive information a user made available for others on a social network website, discuss some of their shortcomings, and discuss research directions for their extensions. In particular, we present our proposal for an extension that takes the privacy score metric from a single social network closed system to include auxiliary background knowledge. Our examples and experimental results show the need to include publicly available background knowledge in the computation of privacy scores in order to get scores that reflect the privacy risks of the users more truthfully. We add background knowledge about users by means of combining several social networks together or by using simple web search for detecting publicly known information about the evaluated users. This is a revision and extension of our former paper.

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Acknowledgments

This work started while the author was with the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalonia and was partly funded by the Spanish Government through projects TSI2007- 65406-C03-01 “E-AEGI” and CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00004 “ARES”, and by the Government of Catalonia through grant 2009 SGR 1135. This work was also partly funded by the Slovak grant VEGA 1/0173/13 while the author was with the Slovak University of Technology. Final thanks go to my former Master’s students Lucia Maringová and Ján Žbirka for carrying out the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Institute of Computer Science and Mathematics, Slovak University of Technology, Ilkovičova 3, 812 17, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Michal Sramka

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  1. Michal Sramka
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Correspondence to Michal Sramka .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Guillermo Navarro-Arribas

  2. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Campus de la UAB, Institut d'Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial, Catalonia, Spain

    Vicenç Torra

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Sramka, M. (2015). Evaluating Privacy Risks in Social Networks from the User’s Perspective. In: Navarro-Arribas, G., Torra, V. (eds) Advanced Research in Data Privacy. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 567. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09885-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09885-2_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09884-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09885-2

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