Privacy protection issues in social networking sites

Social networking sites (SNS) have become very popular during the past few years, as they allow users to both express their individuality and meet people with similar interests. Nonetheless, there are also many potential threats to privacy associated with these SNS such as identity theft and disclosure of sensitive information. However, many users still are not aware of these threats and the privacy settings provided by SNS are not flexible enough to protect user data. In addition, users do not have any control over what others reveal about them. As such, we conduct a preliminary study which examines the privacy protection issues on social networking sites (SNS) such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Based on this study, we identify three privacy problems in SNS and propose a privacy framework as a foundation to cope with these problems.