Security and privacy preserving in social networks

Abstract

Social networking services are having a major impact on people’s daily lives. Ordinary users have taken these social networking facilities as basis for their businesses and for keeping track of their families and friends. In doing so, they add personal information, videos, pictures, and other data that is fundamentally unprotected due to the user’s unawareness and the rigidity of the privacy policies of these facilities. Since users usually sign the privacy policy, granting their ownership of data to the site’s owners, privacy concerns surface. In this paper, we present a privacy policy model—UPP+—for enhancing privacy and security for ordinary users. We use the Alloy language to formalize the model and the Alloy Analyzer to check for any inconsistencies.