Your Privacy, My Privacy? On Leakage Risk Assessment in Online Social Networks

The problem of user privacy enforcement in online social networks (OSN) cannot be ignored and, in recent years, Facebook and other providers have improved considerably their privacy protection tools. However, in OSN’s the most powerful data protection “weapons” are the users themselves. The behavior of an individual acting in an OSN highly depends on her level of privacy attitude, but, in this paper, we show that user privacy is also influenced by contextual properties (e.g., user’s neighborhood attitude, the general behavior of user’s subnetwork) and define a context-aware privacy score to measure a more realistic user privacy risk according to the network properties.