Privacy Protection Based Privacy Conflict Detection and Solution in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on recently are major impact in communication and social interaction. Users can share any information with others. However, they have concerns about losing privacy due to lack of an adequate privacy protection provided by the OSNs. The information posted by the user (owner) might leak to unwanted target users. Especially, when collaborative information (e.g. text, photo, video, link), which has associated with the owner and multiple users (co-owners) in the real world, is posted into the OSNs, the co-owners do not have permission to control and might not be aware their information that is being managed by others. To overcome, collective privacy protection (CPP) is proposed to balance between the collaborative information sharing and the privacy protection for the owner and co-owners by majority vote. It enables the owner to create the privacy policy and the co-owners to make a decision in the privacy policy by vote. It additionally identifies and solves the privacy conflicts because at least one co-owner intends to keep private.