Title: Privacy landscape in online social networks

Authors: Agrima Srivastava; G. Geethakumari

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, BITS Pilani, Hyderbad Campus, Hyderabad, India ' Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, BITS Pilani, Hyderbad Campus, Hyderabad, India

Abstract: These days a large number of people are actively using online social networks (OSNs). OSN users can freely interact with their digital friends and build and maintain their online as well as their offline relationships. Intentionally or unintentionally users share a lot of their personal information on these networks which results in privacy threats and unwanted privacy breaches. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of privacy awareness among users and their inability to effectively make correct use of privacy settings. Privacy in an OSN can be viewed from different perspectives but we mainly focus on user privacy. We present an elaborative privacy landscape where we compare and contrast previous literature, review existing definitions covering taxonomy and privacy concerns in OSNs, discuss different perceptions of privacy amongst users and some privacy preserving approaches to guarantee maximum privacy.

Keywords: privacy preservation; privacy protection; online social networks; OSN; privacy taxonomy; privacy perceptions; privacy enhancing tools; privacy mechanisms; trust; personal information; information sharing; privacy awareness; privacy settings.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMCC.2015.072461

International Journal of Trust Management in Computing and Communications, 2015 Vol.3 No.1, pp.19 - 39

Received: 09 Aug 2014
Accepted: 19 Dec 2014
Published online: 14 Oct 2015 *