Strategies for Privacy Negotiation in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Preserving privacy of posts in online social networks is difficult. One reason for this is that a post can be related to the poster as well as various others that are related to the post. Hence, it is possible to share information that pertains others without their consent. This pathological situation often leads to privacy violations that are hard to revert. Recent approaches advocate use of agreement technologies to enable stakeholders of a post to discuss the privacy configurations of a post. This allows related individuals to express concerns so that various privacy violations are avoided up front. This paper continues in the same line by proposing to use negotiation for reaching privacy agreements among users and introduces a negotiation architecture that combines semantic privacy rules with utility functions. We study various negotiation strategies that are inspired from negotiations in e-commerce. We discuss meaningful metrics for measuring privacy negotiation outcomes. We compare various strategies on a benchmark set of scenarios, similar to the ones that appear in real life social networks.