Design patterns for multiple stakeholders in social computing

Abstract

In social computing, multiple users may have privacy stakes in a content (e.g., a tagged photo). They may all want to have a say on the choice of access control policy for protecting that content. The study of protection schemes for multiple stakeholders in social computing has captured the imagination of researchers, and general-purpose schemes for reconciling the differences of privacy stakeholders have been proposed. A challenge of existing multiple-stakeholder schemes is that they can be very complex. In this work, we consider the possibility of simplification in special cases. If we focus on specific instances of multiple stakeholders, are there simpler design of access control schemes? We identify two design patterns for handling a significant family of multiple-stakeholder scenarios. We discuss efficient implementation techniques that solely rely on standard SQL technology. We also identify scenarios in which general-purpose multiple-stakeholder schemes are necessary. We believe that future work on multiple stakeholders should focus on these scenarios. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.