Classification of commercial and personal profiles on MySpace

Abstract

Online social networks such as MySpace and Facebook have become popular platforms for people to make connections, share information, and interact with each other online. In an online social network, user publishing activities such as sending messages and posting photos, represent online interactions between friends. As more and more businesses use social networks as a means to propagate their “brand name” and distribute information about their product, a good understanding of user publishing characteristics is important for marketing analysis and aids in the ability to provide security measures for online social networks. In this work, we look at the implications of social networks with respect to commercial use. We are particularly interested in classifying commercial and personal profiles to protect the privacy and anonymity of individual users. We present an algorithm that uses online social network publishing relationships, such as publisher age distribution and usage patterns to construct a decision tree based classifier. The result is a C4.5 pruned decision tree which is applied to a Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) service to provide anonymity for online social network users.