Intelligent content-based Privacy Assistant for Facebook

Abstract

Although most online social networks now offer fine-grained controls of information sharing, these are rarely used, both because their use imposes additional burden on the user and because there are too many control settings for an average user to handle. To mitigate this problem, we have developed an Intelligent Privacy Assistant for Facebook that partially automates the assignment of sharing permissions, taking into account the content of the information published and user's high-level sharing policies. The Assistant uses a novel social web privacy language, employs named entity recognition algorithms to annotate sensitive parts of published information and an answer set programming system to evaluate user's privacy policies and determine the list of safe recipients. On a test scenario, the Assistant reached 73.8% and 95.2% performance in correctly determining safe and unsafe recipients, respectively. © 2011 IEEE.