Designing a seamless privacy policy for social networks

Abstract

High-quality privacy policies can form the basis for verifiable automated access decisions in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The aim of the privacy policies is to provide direction and support for data privacy in accordance with user requirements and relevant laws and regulations; unfortunately, most of the times, OSN users seem not to fully comprehend the policies, and to face difficulties in applying privacy rules. As a result, unintentional exposure of users' data to unknown audiences is a usual phenomenon, as the users struggle to balance the sharing and the protection of their Personal Identifiable Information (PII). In this paper, we first map the privacy policies of Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn onto the phases of the PII lifecycle, then we highlight the omissions found and subsequently we propose a new model privacy policy that is based on the PII lifecycle and aims to make the users understand and track all the PII phases during their engagement in OSNs.