An Approach for Protecting Privacy on Social Networks

Social networking has become a part of our life. We redundantly share our personal information with people in social networks and Internet. These networks allow users to share just about everything: data, photos, videos, favorite music, status updates, and more applications. Sharing large amounts of information causes privacy and security problems for users in these networks. To prevent privacy problems, we can provide built-in applications that help to protect our privacy by limiting the friends who get access to our personal information. Many users still do not make use of these applications. Users fail to use the application either because they are not aware that it exists or because of the tedious process that is involved when manually grouping friends into different categories to form a friends list. The privacy problem has prompted us to provide a solution that offers the social networks users an opportunity to protect their privacy. In this study, a privacy and security technique, its algorithm and design were mentioned. Our approach proposes an API, which provides grouping of friends through an automated system into different social groups by analyzing the user's social graph and depending on what common information they would like to share that should not be accessed by other friends. We assume that a user shares the same information in a group, as we call social circles. Finding these social circles will help users to group their friends easily and meaningfully.