A framework for secure and privacy protected collaborative contents sharing using public OSN

A major issue thoroughly raised and potentially vulnerable in online social networks (OSNs) is the user privacy preservation. Generally, the issue of privacy is tackled from the user point of view without considering the service providers and the third-party data collectors, who can manipulate user data for third party advertisement and behavioral analysis. Therefore, the privacy risk exists not only from the unauthorized users but also from the OSN service providers. To secure data from both the unauthorized users and OSN service providers a framework for collaborative contents sharing is proposed. In the proposed framework, contents are secured at the time of data dissemination and provided assurance about the data sharing among the legitimate users based on collaborative contents sharing. The proposed framework assures not only the confidentiality of contents but also the privacy of data owner and co-owners in OSN. An architecture is provided to support the theoretical and practical basis for the proposed framework; which exhibits the objective of preserving user and contents privacy.