Privacy and Ethical Issues in Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more people join social networks, such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Livespace, to share information and to monitor or participate in different activities. This gives people a great opportunity to obtain useful information from these social network data. Meanwhile, the information stored in these social networks are under high risk of attack by various malicious users, in other words, people's privacy could be easily breached via some domain knowledge. Thus, for a service provider, such as Facebook and Linkedin, how to publish a privacy preserving graph becomes an important problem. It is essential to protect users' privacy and at the same time provide "useful" data. Targeting the privacy preserving graph publication problem, in this chapter, we introduce graph publishing models, which cover different aspects of graph publication issues.