Social networks are becoming popular, with people sharing information with their friends on social networking sites. On many of these sites, shared information can be read by all of the friends; however, not all information is suitable for mass distribution and access. Although people can form communities on some sites, this feature is not yet available on all sites. Additionally, it is inconvenient to set receivers for a message when the target community is large. One characteristic of social networks is that people who know each other tend to form densely connected clusters, and connections between clusters are relatively rare. Based on this feature, community-finding algorithms have been proposed to detect communities on social networks. However, it is difficult to apply community-finding algorithms to distributed social networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy control protocol for distributed social networks. By selecting only a small portion of people from a community, our protocol can transmit information to the target community.
Keep It Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing in Social Networks