scholarly journals Empowering users of social networks to assess their privacy risks

Author(s):  
Vladimir Estivill-Castro ◽  
Peter Hough ◽  
Md Zahidul Islam

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Krasnova ◽  
Sarah Spiekermann ◽  
Ksenia Koroleva ◽  
Thomas Hildebrand

On online social networks such as Facebook, massive self-disclosure by users has attracted the attention of Industry players and policymakers worldwide. Despite the Impressive scope of this phenomenon, very little Is understood about what motivates users to disclose personal Information. Integrating focus group results Into a theoretical privacy calculus framework, we develop and empirically test a Structural Equation Model of self-disclosure with 259 subjects. We find that users are primarily motivated to disclose Information because of the convenience of maintaining and developing relationships and platform enjoyment. Countervailing these benefits, privacy risks represent a critical barrier to information disclosure. However, users’ perception of risk can be mitigated by their trust in the network provider and availability of control options. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for network providers.



2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Angeliki Kitsiou ◽  
Eleni Tzortzaki ◽  
Christos Kalloniatis ◽  
Stefanos Gritzalis

Social Networks (SNs) bring new types of privacy risks threats for users; which developers should be aware of when designing respective services. Aiming at safeguarding users’ privacy more effectively within SNs, self-adaptive privacy preserving schemes have been developed, considered the importance of users’ social and technological context and specific privacy criteria that should be satisfied. However, under the current self-adaptive privacy approaches, the examination of users’ social landscape interrelated with their privacy perceptions and practices, is not thoroughly considered, especially as far as users’ social attributes concern. This study, aimed at elaborating this examination in depth, in order as to identify the users’ social characteristics and privacy perceptions that can affect self-adaptive privacy design, as well as to indicate self-adaptive privacy related requirements that should be satisfied for users’ protection in SNs. The study was based on an interdisciplinary research instrument, adopting constructs and metrics from both sociological and privacy literature. The results of the survey lead to a pilot taxonomic analysis for self-adaptive privacy within SNs and to the proposal of specific privacy related requirements that should be considered for this domain. For further establishing of our interdisciplinary approach, a case study scenario was formulated, which underlines the importance of the identified self-adaptive privacy related requirements. In this regard, the study provides further insight for the development of the behavioral models that will enhance the optimal design of self-adaptive privacy preserving schemes in SNs, as well as designers to support the principle of PbD from a technical perspective.



Author(s):  
Georgios Michaelides ◽  
Gábor Hosszú

The importance of the virtual communities’ privacy and security problems comes into prominence by the rapid development of online social networks. This article presents the multiple threats currently plaguing the virtual world, Internet privacy risks, and recommendations and countermeasures to avoid such problems. New generations of users feel comfortable publishing their personal information and narrating their lives. They are often unaware how vulnerable the data in their public profiles are, which a large audience daily accesses. A so-called digital friendship is built among them. Such commercial and social pressures have led to a number of privacy and security risks for social network members. The article presents the most important vulnerabilities and suggests protection methods and solutions that can be utilized according to the threat. Lastly, the authors introduce the concept of a privacy-friendly virtual community site, named CWIW, where privacy methods have been implemented for better user protection.



2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
George Bouchagiar

After having shifted from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, scientists welcome the advent of Web 3.0, an environment where meaning is added to data. While in the Semantic Web people are no longer users, but part of the emerging applications, producers, subjects and beneficiaries of the Big Data, however, opaque processing of personal data poses tremendous risks and dangers for individuals. Given the new era of Big Data this paper studies firms’ purposes and practices to detect some emerging privacy risks. Moreover, theories that deal with social networks are examined to conclude that, even if people state that they value their privacy, however, they often disclose a huge volume of personal information. Taking into account that today’s European concept of privacy is conceptualized in negative terms this paper also proposes the implementation of trust and loyalty into the privacy concept through flexible fiduciary laws. Furthermore, data portability is discussed to detect its potential as a strategic feature, a key tool that will enhance trust. Finally, further scenarios and proposals are submitted, in our attempt to answer the question whether the European concept of privacy could be re-shaped for the benefit of individuals.



Author(s):  
Cong Tang ◽  
Yonggang Wang ◽  
Hu Xiong ◽  
Tao Yang ◽  
Jianbin Hu ◽  
...  


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1632
Author(s):  
George Bouchagiar

After having shifted from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, scientists welcome the advent of Web 3.0, an environment where meaning is added to data. While in the Semantic Web people are no longer users, but part of the emerging applications, producers, subjects and beneficiaries of the Big Data, however, opaque processing of personal data poses tremendous risks and dangers for individuals. Given the new era of Big Data this paper studies firms’ purposes and practices to detect some emerging privacy risks. Moreover, theories that deal with social networks are examined to conclude that, even if people state that they value their privacy, however, they often disclose a huge volume of personal information. Taking into account that today’s European concept of privacy is conceptualized in negative terms this paper also proposes the implementation of trust and loyalty into the privacy concept through flexible fiduciary laws. Furthermore, data portability is discussed to detect its potential as a strategic feature, a key tool that will enhance trust. Finally, further scenarios and proposals are submitted, in our attempt to answer the question whether the European concept of privacy could be re-shaped for the benefit of individuals.



Author(s):  
Georgios Michaelides ◽  
Gábor Hosszú

The importance of the virtual communities’ privacy and security problems comes into prominence by the rapid development of online social networks. This article presents the multiple threats currently plaguing the virtual world, Internet privacy risks, and recommendations and countermeasures to avoid such problems. New generations of users feel comfortable publishing their personal information and narrating their lives. They are often unaware how vulnerable the data in their public profiles are, which a large audience daily accesses. A so-called digital friendship is built among them. Such commercial and social pressures have led to a number of privacy and security risks for social network members. The article presents the most important vulnerabilities and suggests protection methods and solutions that can be utilized according to the threat. Lastly, the authors introduce the concept of a privacy-friendly virtual community site, named CWIW, where privacy methods have been implemented for better user protection.



Author(s):  
Kurt Thomas ◽  
Chris Grier ◽  
David M. Nicol


2011 ◽  
pp. 1051-1062
Author(s):  
Georgios Michaelides ◽  
Gábor Hosszú

The importance of the virtual communities’ privacy and security problems comes into prominence by the rapid development of online social networks. This article presents the multiple threats currently plaguing the virtual world, Internet privacy risks, and recommendations and countermeasures to avoid such problems. New generations of users feel comfortable publishing their personal information and narrating their lives. They are often unaware how vulnerable the data in their public profiles are, which a large audience daily accesses. A so-called digital friendship is built among them. Such commercial and social pressures have led to a number of privacy and security risks for social network members. The article presents the most important vulnerabilities and suggests protection methods and solutions that can be utilized according to the threat. Lastly, the authors introduce the concept of a privacy-friendly virtual community site, named CWIW, where privacy methods have been implemented for better user protection.



2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiaozhi Wang ◽  
Hao Xue ◽  
Fengjun Li ◽  
Dongwon Lee ◽  
Bo Luo

Abstract With the growing popularity of online social networks, a large amount of private or sensitive information has been posted online. In particular, studies show that users sometimes reveal too much information or unintentionally release regretful messages, especially when they are careless, emotional, or unaware of privacy risks. As such, there exist great needs to be able to identify potentially-sensitive online contents, so that users could be alerted with such findings. In this paper, we propose a context-aware, text-based quantitative model for private information assessment, namely PrivScore, which is expected to serve as the foundation of a privacy leakage alerting mechanism. We first solicit diverse opinions on the sensitiveness of private information from crowdsourcing workers, and examine the responses to discover a perceptual model behind the consensuses and disagreements. We then develop a computational scheme using deep neural networks to compute a context-free PrivScore (i.e., the “consensus” privacy score among average users). Finally, we integrate tweet histories, topic preferences and social contexts to generate a personalized context-aware PrivScore. This privacy scoring mechanism could be employed to identify potentially-private messages and alert users to think again before posting them to OSNs.



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