Title: Privacy protection of tagged multimedia content in online social networks

Authors: Alexandra Michota; Sokratis Katsikas

Addresses: Systems Security Laboratory, School of Information and Communication Technologies, Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, 150 Androutsou St. Piraeus 18532, Greece ' Systems Security Laboratory, School of Information and Communication Technologies, Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, 150 Androutsou St. Piraeus 18532, Greece; Center for Cyber and Information Security, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 191, Gjøvik N-2802, Norway

Abstract: Tagging services in online social networks (OSNs) allow users to connect online resources based on their characteristics in addition to their uniform resource locators (URLs). The semantic interoperability creates authorisation conflicts when accessing the tagged shared content; as a result, privacy requirements cannot be fully satisfied. In this paper, we investigate the privacy implications of unauthorised audience discrepancies in tagged multimedia content that are due to the different privacy restrictions that users apply to their personal identifiable information (PII). By examining all the possible visibility combinations in a two-level social relationship scale for different anonymised real user profiles, according to the offered choices that are provided by the privacy mechanisms in OSNs, we identified the cases where there exist audience discrepancies that can cause privacy breaches. Our findings indicate that the current privacy mechanisms of OSN users' tagged multimedia content are insufficient, as they cannot fully match the users' privacy intentions.

Keywords: tag; sharing content; personally identifiable information; privacy; visibility.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEG.2017.088222

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2017 Vol.9 No.3/4, pp.343 - 360

Accepted: 23 Jun 2017
Published online: 29 Nov 2017 *

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