Tweet-scan-post: a system for analysis of sensitive private data disclosure in online social media

The social media technologies are open to users who are intended in creating a community and publishing their opinions of recent incidents. The participants of the online social networking sites remain ignorant of the criticality of disclosing personal data to the public audience. The private data of users are at high risk leading to many adverse effects like cyberbullying, identity theft, and job loss. This research work aims to define the user entities or data like phone number, email address, family details, health-related information as user’s sensitive private data (SPD) in a social media platform. The proposed system, Tweet-Scan-Post (TSP), is mainly focused on identifying the presence of SPD in user’s posts under personal, professional, and health domains. The TSP framework is built based on the standards and privacy regulations established by social networking sites and organizations like NIST, DHS, GDPR. The proposed approach of TSP addresses the prevailing challenges in determining the presence of sensitive PII, user privacy within the bounds of confidentiality and trustworthiness. A novel layered classification approach with various state-of-art machine learning models is used by the TSP framework to classify tweets as sensitive and insensitive. The findings of TSP systems include 201 Sensitive Privacy Keywords using a boosting strategy, sensitivity scaling that measures the degree of sensitivity allied with a tweet. The experimental results revealed that personal tweets were highly related to mother and children, professional tweets with apology, and health tweets with concern over the father’s health condition.