Towards Measuring Knowledge Exposure in Online Social Networks

Abstract

We propose a novel metric to measure users' exposure to various pieces of knowledge in an Online Social Network (OSN). Knowledge exposure considers not only the availability of information to users but also the effort it takes to discover it. We calculate knowledge exposure by performing link analysis on a navigation graph that models OSN's user interface. Our experiments show that the proposed metric can discriminate among pieces of knowledge based on how they are presented to users. We expect such an exposure metric to be useful as an input to privacy control policies and to enhance user privacy management in social networking environments in general.