PScore: A Framework for Enhancing Privacy Awareness in Online Social Networks

Abstract

The phenomenal increase in the use of social media in recent years has raised a number of issues related to privacy. In this paper, we propose a framework for raising the awareness of Online Social Network (OSN) users with respect to the information about them that is disclosed and that can be inferred by OSN service operators as well as by third parties that can access their data. This framework takes the form of a semantic, hierarchical scoring structure, that enables users to easily browse over different privacy-related aspects of their presence in a social network. Contrary to previous privacy scoring approaches, the proposed framework provides a finer and more intuitive organization of privacy information. Importantly, it also takes into account both information that is explicitly mentioned in users' shared content, as well as implicit information, that may be inferred from it. We make available an open source implementation of the framework.