Automating user privacy policy recommendations in social media

Abuelgasim, Ammar

Automating user privacy policy recommendations in social media

Master Thesis

2016

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Computer Science

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

Most Social Media Platforms (SMPs) implement privacy policies that enable users to protect their sensitive information against privacy violations. However, observations indicate that users find these privacy policies cumbersome and difficult to configure. Consequently, various approaches have been proposed to assist users with privacy policy configuration. These approaches are however, limited to either protecting only profile attributes, or only protecting user-generated content. This is problematic, because both profile attributes and user-generated content can contain sensitive information. Therefore, protecting one without the other, can still result in privacy violations. A further drawback of existing approaches is that most require considerable user input which is time consuming and inefficient in terms of privacy policy configuration. In order to address these problems, we propose an automated privacy policy recommender system. The system relies on the expertise of existing social media users, as well as the user's privacy policy history in order to provide him/her with personalized privacy policy suggestions for both profile attributes, and user-generated content. Results from our prototype implementation indicate that the proposed recommender system provides accurate privacy policy suggestions, with minimum user input.

Keywords

Computer Science

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