Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

 

Home

• [P974] Sh@re: Negotiated Audit in Social Networks
  Author(s): Alejandro Gutierrez, Apeksha Godiyal, Matt Stockton, Michael LeMay, Carl Gunter, Roy H. Campbell
  
  

  Abstract
  With the phenomenal growth in the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, there has been an ever increasing concern about the privacy threats posed by these sites. Typical users enter lots of personal details about themselves and are oblivious to the possible consequences like identity theft and stalking. There is an urgent need to educate users about how their personal data is being manipulated by other users on these sites and there has been surprisingly little work on this. In this paper, we introduce the concept of negotiated audit in social networking sites which gives users valuable feedback about how their data is being used. Our design has three levels of auditing for both sharing and browsing data: no audit, complete audit and anonymous audit. Users can classify their data as requiring some level of auditing and can also set their browsing preference to one of the auditing levels. Users can only see some data if their browsing preference is compatible with the data's audit level thus giving rise to negotiation of how much users are willing to reveal about their activities and how much data they will be able to access. We implemented Sh@re, a simple social network which incorporates privacy feedback for users based on these three levels of auditing.

  
   

Full Text (PDF)