Privacy Threats Related to User Profiling in Online Social Networks

The popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has increased the visibility of users profiles and interactions performed between users. In this paper we structure different privacy threats related to OSNs and describe six different types of privacy threats. One of these threats, named public information harvesting, is previously not documented so we therefore present it in further detail by also presenting the results from a proof-of-concept implementation of that threat. The basis of the attack is gathering of user interactions from various open groups on Facebook which then is transformed into a social interaction graph. Since the data gathered from the OSN originates from open groups it could be executed by any third-party connected to the Internet independently of the users' privacy settings. In addition to presenting the different privacy threats we also we propose a range of different protection techniques.