A privacy-aware framework for decentralized online social networks

Abstract

Online social networks based on a single service provider suffer several drawbacks, first of all the privacy issues arising from the delegation of user data to a single entity. Distributed online social networks (DOSN) have been recently proposed as an alternative solution allowing users to keep control of their private data. However, the lack of a centralized entity introduces new problems, like the need of defining proper privacy policies for data access and of guaranteeing the availability of user’s data when the user disconnects from the social network. This paper introduces a privacy-aware support for DOSN enabling users to define a set of privacy policies which describe who is entitled to access the data in their social profile. These policies are exploited by the DOSN support to decide the re-allocation of the profile when the user disconnects from the social network. The proposed approach is validated through a set of simulations performed on real traces logged from Facebook.