Privacy protection of tagged multimedia content in online social networks

摘要

Tagging services in online social networks (OSNs) allow users to connect online resources based on their characteristics in addition to their uniform resource locators (URLs). The semantic interoperability creates authorisation conflicts when accessing the tagged shared content; as a result, privacy requirements cannot be fully satisfied. In this paper, we investigate the privacy implications of unauthorised audience discrepancies in tagged multimedia content that are due to the different privacy restrictions that users apply to their personal identifiable information (PII). By examining all the possible visibility combinations in a two-level social relationship scale for different anonymised real user profiles, according to the offered choices that are provided by the privacy mechanisms in OSNs, we identified the cases where there exist audience discrepancies that can cause privacy breaches. Our findings indicate that the current privacy mechanisms of OSN users' tagged multimedia content are insufficient, as they cannot fully match the users' privacy intentions.