Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre and The Open University have developed a framework which could be used to strengthen user privacy on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. A proposed ‘adaptive model’ of sharing would see users’ content analysed before posting, and shared to subsets of contacts without the need to revise privacy settings of set up lists.
The development is the result of a European Research Council Advanced Grant worth €2.5 million awarded to Bashar Nuseibeh, Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Limerick and a Professor of Computing at The Open University.
“Over 1.3 billion active Facebook users share more than 30 billion items of information every month,” said Prof Nuseibeh. “The big problem is that they have limited control over where this data ends up. Once information is sent to selected friends, users lose control over it.”
Prof Nuseibeh suggested that most users use default privacy settings, which may lead to information being shared to unintended members of social network groups regardless of their variable risk profiles. “Even more privacy-aware users may still make wrong sharing decisions due to a lack of information about privacy threats and the consequences of sharing.
“Our research has the potential to benefit not only individual users who want to protect their privacy, but also the online social network providers themselves who may need to respond more effectively to user concerns or future regulatory requirements.”
Prof Nuseibeh’s research paper, ‘Adaptive Sharing for Online Social Networks: A trade-off between privacy risk and social benefit’ was presented at the 13th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications in Beijing, China, in September 2014, where it received the best paper award.
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