Collaborative access control mechanism for online social networks

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) offer an attractive mean for digital social interactions and information sharing among the users. At the same time, it raises a number of security and privacy issues. Especially, there is no efficient mechanism to enforce privacy over data associated with multiple users. This paper proposes a privacy preserving mechanism to allow the users to control access of their shared resources in a collaborative manner. We have developed a Facebook application “msecure” and made a ‘survey based user study’ of the app with a user base of (n = 50). The results of the study reveals popularity of it among users. The study indicates that users are still concerned about the privacy of their shared contents and they believe that a tool like “msecure” could be useful for managing their shared images and other shared contents.