Policy Aware Social Miner

There is a wealth of sensitive information available on the Web about any individual that is generated either by her or by others on social networking sites. This information could be used to make important decisions about that individual. The problem is that although people know that searches for their personal information are possible, they have no way to either control the data that is put on the Web by others or indicate how they would like to restrict usage of their own data. We describe a framework called Policy Aware Social Miner (PASM) that would provide a solution to these problems by giving users a way to semantically annotate data on the Web using policies to guide how searches about them should be executed. PASM accepts search queries and applies the user's policies on the results. It filters results over data the user owns and provides the user's refutation link on search results that the user does not own. These usage control mechanisms for privacy allow users to break away from siloed data privacy management and have their privacy settings applied to all their data available on the Web.