Privacy protection and adding security strength

This is the third issue of 2017. I am glad to see that the journal continues to grow and we have begun to see articles submitted from many countries of the world as well as a variety of topics. The current issue includes a wide spectrum of articles. The main focus lies on the issues of protecting consumers’ privacy as well as strengthening the security by using a stronger password. The first article titled “Detecting and Preventing Inference Attacks in Online Social Networks: A DataDriven and Holistic Framework” by Xiaoyun He and Haibing Lu proposed a framework to alleviate the rule-based inference problem by detecting and breaking the inferences that are represented as rules of attributes and/or attribute values. The authors believed that the proposed framework should enable individual users to check their online profiles for satisfaction of their privacy preferences and allow them tomodify profiles to prevent the disclosure of private information. In this article, the authors also proposed a novel method to minimize the modifications to user profiles in order to prevent inference attacks while preserving the utility. In the second article titled “Invasion of Privacy by Smart Meters: An Analysis of Consumer Concerns,” the authors ZiyueHuang andPrashant Palvia developed an instrument tomeasure the consumers’ concerns for information privacy (CFIP) in adopting smart meters. They then proposed a conceptual model to examine the relationship between privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, risk beliefs, and intention to adopt smart meters. Based on the data collected from 217 survey respondents, the study findings revealed that consumers’ information privacy concerns about adopting smart meters can be measured by three dimensions: collection, secondary use, and improper access. In addition, the effect of information privacy concerns on behavioral intention is fully mediated by risk beliefs. The result also suggested that among the control variables, education has a positive effect on intention, while privacy experience has a negative effect. The third article titled “Valuing Information Security: A Look at the Influence of User Engagement on Information Security Strength” by Randall J. Boyle, Chandrashekar D. Challa, and Jeffrey A. Clements focused on the influence of user engagement on users’ information security practices. The study took a closer look at the passwords people are using. The authors pointed out that password strength is affected by some factors, such as the length of the password, the types of characters people used, the number of duplicate passwords, and the number of uncrackable passwords. The main focus of this study is to understand why some people choose better passwords than others. The findings generally support the view that higher levels of engagement are associated with stronger passwords. In the Book Review section, FarukArslan reviews the book titledWeapons ofMathDestruction: HowBig Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil. The book consists of 10 chapters discussing the deficiencies of data sciences applications. Overall, Dr. Arslan finds the book to be an intriguing and well-written and the book containsmany real-life examples for researchers and practitioners alike. In his opinion, this book shall be incorporated in the curriculum of any serious academic program focusing on data science.